MCe optimizations
Device screen sizes

Summary:

We are the only CMMS/EAS product that optimizes your productivity and user experience to a wide range of devices.

We have major optimizations for 22 screen sizes and 100's of secondary optimizations based on your screen size and/or your data. These optimizations range from cell phone through tablets to typical laptop and desktop screen resolutions.

Details:

To give you the best value, the best productivity, we provide currently 22 'primary' size optimizations, yes twenty two, and it is all automatic, you don't have to do anything to reap the benefits.

  • 4 cell phone sizes, portrait, landscape (total of 8) optimizations, one of these is the size that some competitors have a product they optimize for.
  • 4 primary tablet, portrait, landscape (total of 8) optimizations, we have not seen any competitors that optimize for tablets. If you use split app screen, you will likely also benefit from one or more of the 8 cell phone optimizations.
  • 3 primary tall browser (portrait) and wide browser (landscape) (total of 6) optimizations, we have never seen a competitor optimize for more than one of these, 1024x768 or 1920x1080; which one they choose seems mostly dependent on what screen sizes where common when they designed it.
    • Noting that these 3 sizes are all bigger than the tablet and cell phone optimizations. If you size your desktop browser window smaller, you will benefit from the tablet and cell phone optimizations as appropriate.

Then we have 100's of 'secondary' size optimizations, some related only to screen size, some related to screen size and the data in particular being shown.

Then to make a good thing even better, for more than a decade we give the ability for you to optimize the size of the UI elements through our Accessibility program so you can optimize for your eyesight (larger text typically for older people), finger size (ability to 'hit' the target you are aiming for with your finger), and amount of data shown at a time on your screen.

We don't yet optimize for ultrawide or multiple ultrawide screens. For those we currently recommend taking advantage of opening 2 or more browsers; for example, assets in one, WOs in another. We are currently designing features to take more advantage of huge screens as they are currently popular among developers and we expect will become popular for many people in the coming years, if you have one or more ultrawides, or you would like to, and you have some ideas how you would like us to give you better productivity on extremely large or wide screens – please let us know. For now, use the multi-browser window suggestion and/or use the rest of the screen for other applications.

If you are bored one day or just want to understand the optimizations, go to something like the WO list or WO Edit, and slowly make your browser screen smaller. Noting that, without using the developer tools in the browser, you might not be able to scale some browsers as small as a cell phone. As you resize down slowly, you will see dozens of optimizations happening at the different sizes, and then as you scale up again, you will see the optimizations for larger screen.

Harder to 'see' we also have optimization for device performance, noting that the larger the screen, the more power generally needed to keep the screen up to date.

On the cell phone sizes, you will see that we try very hard to only have you scroll up and down. Actually we try for that on all screen sizes. It is generally more intuitive to do a finger swipe to move up and down than to do it left and right. Also, on devices with mouses (mouses is the correct plural for computer 'mice') you will almost have a scroll wheel that goes up and down, if you have an advanced mouse with a left/right scroll wheel, they are inherently more difficult to scroll than the vertical scroll wheel due to how your finger is jointed.

But what about PDF reports?

When running PDF reports, you view them using whatever software you have on your device to view PDF. It may therefore, like most competitive software, display it by scaling it down to fit – making it unreadable by default.

You should look at that software to see if they give you the ability to set a reasonable default.

So should you always use a large screen? Always use a cell phone?

When you can conveniently use a large screen, it will often give you value of seeing more information at a glance or without having to move the cursor or mouse.

But a cell phone has the advantage of being easy to carry anywhere, even when crawling inside equipment.

Many users use both two devices, they pick a smaller one like a cell phone or tablet, and a second one that is larger. Getting the best productivity and experience possible.

Some of the optimizations we do:

On a cell phone, you get one panel of info at a time. On wider screen we show more panels. We change the number of 'columns' within the panel based on width. We call this our "List/Edit/Valet/Global" model. Typically you will have a list on the left panel, Info about a specific item from the list on the middle panel, extra information about the module and the system on the valet (right hand) panel and on the final panel (bottom on tablet and up sizes) that is Global information – a dashboard of info you always want around. You can 'hide' the Global panel as well as the Valet panel if you don't like them.

When things get really small, we will change text to icons. See the tasks list, where "fail" will become a triangle with an ! inside it. N/A becomes a circle with a / in it, and complete becomes a checkmark.

Some things we do NOT do:

We do not make the text smaller and smaller as you view on a smaller window. Think about how many web sites have everything just scale down to fit, making it unreadable on most cell phones. We start with a font size and we let you change it, then we maintain that and make other changes to accommodate. To understand this, think about how PDF viewers typically make the page 'fit' on a screen by making everything so small you can't read it – that is an extreme example of how some web sites change font size on you to make things fit.

Some web sites, such as the New Your Times circa 2022, make a set of responsive changes as you get smaller to give you a better view of the data (good), but if you start narrower or go narrow first, then when you get larger – they don't go back(bad)! They maintain the 'small screen' optimizations until you go (if you can) to a much larger size than you started, so you lose the better large screen optimizations when you go up in size. In our case, our optimizations are consistent scaling down and scaling back up.

Conclusion:

Our screen layouts automatically adapt based on your needs and your screen resolution to give you the ultimate productivity no matter what equipment you have, what your eyesight and finger size are like, and what personalizations make it optimum for you.

Futures:

We have been thinking about most of these for years, we do have some ideas, but for now, they are still in 'think about' mode.

Thinking about optimizations for higher resolution screens, both taller and wider. Update:12.1.5 has beta version in the WO admin and Asset Admin for this. If it goes well, we'll be bringing it throughout the system in a near future version.

Thinking about a stand-a-lone hang on the wall, no direct interaction dashboard UI.

Thinking about how we could bring useful functionality to a watch, without excessive costs in dollars and in time to setup and use.

Thinking about how we could bring useful functionality through Alexa, Google assistant and/or Siri.