Report Listing improved UX
When you go to Reports menu » X Reports, where X
is anything, you get the report listing page (CRM_Report_Page_InstanceList
). This page hard-codes the order the reports appear in.
- First by component
- Second by the weight of the report template ID in the
report_template
option value list - Third alphabetized by title.
The second sort criterium is the problematic one. I propose we sort by component, then alphabetically.
I assume the original thinking was, "Let's keep all the Contribution Summary reports together, all the Contribution Detail reports", etc. However, I think this isn't an ideal UX:
- Users don't know (or care about) the order of report templates in the option value list.
- Reports can be sorted any number of ways: By user, department, workflow - but those are unlikely to map to report templates.
- This is all especially true in an era where there's many report extensions that provide overlapping reports with core (Extended Reports, Reports Plus, Pivot Reports). I think it makes more sense not to sort by report type.