Manual Entry Dialog

[christianalles]

I noticed two things making manual entries:

First is a minor bug:
Manual entry form fields are not reset after adding an entry, so when you add another one you will have a prefilled form.
This is a bit irritating because the user could thing that he is editing the previous entry instead of creating another one.

The other is a suggestion to make manual entries more comfortable/quicker:
Instead of entering start date, start time hours, start time minutes, end date, end time hours end time minutes,
It might be quicker and more user friendly just to specify start date and a duration/time span in days, hours and minutes, where days/hours should be optional.
Thus an entry could be as quick as selecting a date, typing a name an entering a duration in minutes. This way we could enter the time part of the entry by specifiying 2 to a maximum of 4 values instead of 6. Also the calendar widget could be half as big.

Cheers

[31SFX4]

Only duration would not be good for me, as I usually think in terms of "I started at 2:30 end finished at 4:15", and having to work out the duration first before being able to enter it would be a step in the wrong direction and make it more complicated.
Users probably have different preferences, so both should be possible: an end time and a duration field, and when you fill in one of those, the other is calculated.

[puthre]

I think the time interval should be reset when adding a new manual work item (not the name and description) and the popup window name should be changed to "Add work item".
The second issue, as @smatthie remarked, I don;t think will improve the experience,, users keep track of tasks as starting times and ending times, not as durations.

[christianalles]

I concur with @smatthie that user obviously have different preferences, so the calculated or optional duration field might be a solution, though it would clutter the date entry and probably would it make less intuitive.

So maybe the thing that seems tedious to me and could be improved is the way the manual entry dialog is structured.
Meaning while creating a manual entry, to enter the time, which you obviously always want to do, you need to open a second dialog (rather bulky) by clicking on interval.
An improvement could be replacing the interval field with start and end time input components, like:
start: datepicker timepicker
end: datepicker timepicker
end date could default automatically to start date except the user manually defines an end date other than start.
And for the timepicker it really would be nice to enter hours and minutes in one go using the keyboard instead or as an alternative to scrolling through a dropdown menu.
This way in the most common use case a user would only need to pick one date and quickly make two time entries using the keyboard.
Once again I'm just voicing my opinion, other users might be perfectly happy with the dialog as it is, though I think there is room for improvement concerning the manual entry feature.