Some loose ends in the new pricing UI

jfriend

I've been playing with the new pricing stuff and found some things in the UI that could be a lot clearer (probably with relatively small effort). I will try to describe them and hopefully there's someone listening who can do something about them.

First, the method of picking which printer for your portfolio pricing is way too subtle. The BayPhoto and EzPrints buttons are serving two functions. First, they are the selector of which service's prices you are setting. Second, whichever one happens to be selected when you hit Save Pricing becomes the default. It's way too easy to mess up. The reason this may be more confusing that you originally thought is that people are setting default prices for both providers so that when they go into a gallery and pick the other provider, the prices are already filled in for them. But, if you want to back to portfolio pricing to tweak a price in the non-default provider, you HAVE to remember to pick the other provider before you hit Save pricing or you will inadvertently change your default provider. It should be a very deliberate operation to change your default provider, not a side effect like it is now. I would suggest a separate control that lets you pick which provider is the defailt provider and let the current controls be the selector for whose prices you are viewing.

Second, the steps required to set default prices for both providers is not obvious. I discovered a way to do it here, but as you can tell from that thread, it was not obvious to other users. This is a very valuable feature to be able to do because then it only takes one click on the gallery pricing screen to flip between your preset prices for BayPhoto vs. different preset prices for EzPrints. But, it's not very discoverable how to do it.

Third, once you've set a gallery to gallery pricing, how do you get a gallery back to portfolio pricing? I've not been able to figure this out. It should work like themes where there's an obvious option to "Revert to Portfolio pricing".

Fourth, why isn't there an ability to get to your Portfolio pricing from the top level Tools menu. It would be a natural for pros. Go to Control Panel, View Pro Sales, Set Pro Pricing. It has always felt odd that you have to go into a gallery to get to the portfolio pricing. Further, every time you go into that gallery and bring up pricing, the screen defaults to gallery pricing. I can't tell you how many times, I've gone to change my portfolio pricing, made a whole bunch of edits only to find that I've been editing the gallery pricing not the portfolio pricing. If you could get to portfolio pricing from the top level homepage Tools menu, that's where I'd go to it and I wouldn't have this problem (there wouldn't even be any Gallery or Image pricing there.

Fifth, the "To These Products" drop-down needs a selection for all non-digital download products. It's way too easy to go set yourself a default markup on all prints and find you've enabled really, really cheap digital downloads. Further the digital downloads are on another tab so you won't even see that you've done that. Further, these really cheap digital downloads are bad business for Smugmug too because they're so cheap you aren't even covering your processing costs. There ought to be an obvious way to set defaults for all print products that are not digital downloads. And digital downloads should be priced differently. The HUGE difference for digital downloads is that their base price is $0.00 so it pretty much never works to include the same bulk pricing adjustment that you do for print products. Yet, there is no way to select all non-digital-download products. As evidence of how easy this is to mess up, I (unintentionally) had $0.01 digital downloads on my site for awhile and someone even ordered several that way. This was in a gallery that I enabled originals for parents to download.

Sixth, when entering prices, there's a pop-up that comes up with previously entered prices (in FF3). It's a real pain. It makes it much more tedious to go down the list and enter prices because it gets in the way of entering the next price and add clicks to make it go away. This seems like a case where we ought to just not have the pop-up that offers previously entered things. It's more in the way than it is helpful. If I recall, this is a browser function, but there is a way in the HTML to tell the browser not to do it.

Andy

Thanks John. I've made sure Lee & Wade have seen this.

jfriend

Here's another issue that bites several of us. When we want to either do a dollar increase or a percentage increase, we select the type of increase, enter an amount, pick which products for it to apply to, hit the apply button and nothing happens. That's because it doesn't do anything on prices that aren't filled in yet (even though they are essentially prices at smugmug default prices because they are blank).

Before these operations will do anythning, you have to first fill in the smugmug default pricing and you have to know that that's how it works (something many of us didn't seem to know). This seems like an unnecessary extra step. If the price is blank, it's already at the smugmug default price. Why not just let the percentage change or dollar change go from the default price without making us know we have to fill in the default price first. There's only one possible thing we could mean, so why not do that one thing.

cabbey

jfriend wrote:

Here's another issue that bites several of us. When we want to either do a dollar increase or a percentage increase, we select the type of increase, enter an amount, pick which products for it to apply to, hit the apply button and nothing happens. That's because it doesn't do anything on prices that aren't filled in yet (even though they are essentially prices at smugmug default prices because they are blank).

Before these operations will do anythning, you have to first fill in the smugmug default pricing and you have to know that that's how it works (something many of us didn't seem to know). This seems like an unnecessary extra step. If the price is blank, it's already at the smugmug default price. Why not just let the percentage change or dollar change go from the default price without making us know we have to fill in the default price first. There's only one possible thing we could mean, so why not do that one thing.

It's actually slightly more complicated than that... blank doesn't mean "SmugMug default", it means something more like "walk up the inheritance chain until you find a price." That chain is: image -> gallery -> portfolio -> default.

And while some folks would want those options to convert blank to filled in, many other folks do NOT want those to convert blank to filled in, because they have explicitly gone through and removed prices that they don't want.

Ideally, I think a good compromise is another option in the 'Apply This Pricing' option to pick "effective pricing" or something. bwg: I can has?

cabbey

jfriend wrote:

Sixth, when entering prices, there's a pop-up that comes up with previously entered prices (in FF3). It's a real pain. It makes it much more tedious to go down the list and enter prices because it gets in the way of entering the next price and add clicks to make it go away. This seems like a case where we ought to just not have the pop-up that offers previously entered things. It's more in the way than it is helpful. If I recall, this is a browser function, but there is a way in the HTML to tell the browser not to do it.

If you have a solution for this that's browser agnostic, I'd love to see it, there are a few other places where that "feature" annoys the stuffing out of me that I'd like to be able to do just that, to tell the browser not to offer history completion. I've not been able to find any such option via google.

jfriend

cabbey wrote:

It's actually slightly more complicated than that... blank doesn't mean "SmugMug default", it means something more like "walk up the inheritance chain until you find a price." That chain is: image -> gallery -> portfolio -> default.

And while some folks would want those options to convert blank to filled in, many other folks do NOT want those to convert blank to filled in, because they have explicitly gone through and removed prices that they don't want.

Ideally, I think a good compromise is another option in the 'Apply This Pricing' option to pick "effective pricing" or something. bwg: I can has?

Remember here. I'm talking about setting portfolio prices. Blank only means one thing in that regard. It means use the default price because we're already at the top of the inheritance chain. If a portfolio price is blank, then it's implicit value is the smugmug default price. If I leave it blank or enter the smugmug default price in that item, both will cause the exact same price to show to the customer. So, if I want to raise all portfolio prices by 30%, I'm still at a loss why I have to first fill in all blank items with the default prices before I can raise them by 30%. What else would I have possibly meant when I instructed the pricing tool to raise all prices by 30%?

Sure, a given gallery price or image price might override the portfolio price when applied to a given image in a gallery, but that has nothing to do with setting the portfolio price in the first place. The portfolio price is the price that will be in effect if there are no overrides.

bwg

jfriend wrote:

Remember here. I'm talking about setting portfolio prices.

lol. okay.

jfriend

cabbey wrote:

If you have a solution for this that's browser agnostic, I'd love to see it, there are a few other places where that "feature" annoys the stuffing out of me that I'd like to be able to do just that, to tell the browser not to offer history completion. I've not been able to find any such option via google.

I don't know much about this, but I was under the impression that <input autocomplete="off"> worked in a number of browsers. I presume you saw that in your searches. Is there a reason that it doesn't work or can't be used?

cabbey

jfriend wrote:

I don't know much about this, but I was under the impression that <input autocomplete="off"> worked in a number of browsers. I presume you saw that in your searches. Is there a reason that it doesn't work or can't be used?

It didn't work in either of my first two tests, FF3 and Safari... I didn't bother with anything more esoteric.

jfriend

cabbey wrote:

It didn't work in either of my first two tests, FF3 and Safari... I didn't bother with anything more esoteric.

I made a simple form and it worked for me in FF3, Safari and IE7.

Here's what I put in a test page.

[B]<[/B]!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
[B]<[/B]html>
[B]<[/B]head>
[B]<[/B]/head>
[B]<[/B]body>
[B]<[/B]form action="getform" method="get" autocomplete="on">
Type here [B]<[/B]input type="text" name="theText">[B]<[/B]br/>
[B]<[/B]input type="submit" value="Submit">

[B]<[/B]/form>
[B]<[/B]/body>
[B]<[/B]/html>

I load this page into the browser from my hard drive. I typed "aaabbb" into the form and hit the submit button. Since there's no real submit here, it made an error. I hit the back button. I cleared the edit field. I typed "a" and you can then see that it offers autocomplete for "aaabbb".

Then, edit the form. Change autocomplete="on" to autocomplete="off".

Reload the form into the browser. Type "aaabbb". Hit submit. Hit back. Clear the field. Type "aa" into the field. No auto-complete. I could turn autocomplete on and off in this simple form in all three browsers.

It seemed to work for me.

bwg

jfriend wrote:

I made a simple form and it worked for me in FF3, Safari and IE7...

yeah, dunno what cabbey is smoking. pretty universal. The autocomplete doesnt bother me but i'm gonna have to turn it off because I've been banging my head against this stupid bug in FF http://mattsnider.com/x-browser/x-browser-firefox-permission-denied-to-set-property-xulelementselectedindex/

cabbey

bigwebguy wrote:

yeah, dunno what cabbey is smoking. pretty universal. The autocomplete doesnt bother me but i'm gonna have to turn it off because I've been banging my head against this stupid bug in FF http://mattsnider.com/x-browser/x-browser-firefox-permission-denied-to-set-property-xulelementselectedindex/

Only the best stuff from Santa Cruz of course.

Looking at my olde sample code, I appear to have had a case of the dumbs and didn't recognize my ablum.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Thanks John. I've made sure Lee & Wade have seen this. They'll reply in detail.

I never saw a "reply in detail" from Lee or Wade. Is it coming?

Andy

jfriend wrote:

I never saw a "reply in detail" from Lee or Wade. Is it coming?

I think they're hard at work John. Thanks for you great input.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

I think they're hard at work John. Thanks for you great input.

It's sad that what I thought was thoughtful feedback that I spent a fair amount of time on can have no discussion/debate with anyone responsible for that functionality. Oh well.

As you know, that kind of interaction is what drives me to produce this feedback in the first place and what used to separate Smugmug from other services I use. Without any feedback from someone actually responsible for the functionality, I have absolutely no way of knowing if it's just going into a great big bit bucket in the sky or not.

I'm not sure I'll keep writing up this type of feedback any more since there appears to be nobody to actually discuss/debate it with.

jfriend

For anyone interested, this thread is a perfect example of how someone looking in the Smugmug UI for "Portfolio Pricing" or "Default Pricing" would look in the control panel or the top level Tools menu and not find it there. That was one of my points of feedback in the main post in this thread.

bwg

jfriend wrote:

...there appears to be nobody to actually discuss/debate it with.

Honestly John, "debating" with you takes more time and energy than i have available. You're not being ignored. I see most things you post. Things that need my attention, Andy makes sure I see.

Regarding your price tool issues: some of your concerns are valid, others I disagree with. When I make the next round of updates to the price tool, I will reevaluate.