Goal:
Help our partners and customers use our solutions with little to no advanced training. This is a key to success as many users of our solutions are volunteers or people engaged just in disaster activities and use the system for just minutes or days.
GenX Controls Rock:
Starting this year, the delivery team at Aidmatrix has taken up “innovation projects” as a part of enhancing their work experience. The goal is to work on innovations which can also benefit Aidmatrix, long-term. As a part of this exercise, I enhanced some of the features of GenX Controls.
GenX is a term used within the delivery circles, which is basically a cooler term for flex fields (dynamic controls). GenX is a step up from ZIM controls which were flex fields as well, but ZIM was more of an addition to the page rather than the page being entirely created by GenX controls.
GenX has the ability to populate the controls on a page which are configured in the database. Since the Aidmatrix In-kind Application is a multi-tenant application, each of the portals can now have a customizable “Enter Donation” or “Enter Needs” page. The pages can also be customized based on the categories that the user selects.
This ability to populate controls into pages at runtime is a very powerful feature. This gives users the ability to capture information that is unique and critical to their organization. The user is able to specify the quantity and type of flex fields that they need.
Innovation / New Features:
The two new features added to flex fields are:
TextBox Balloon Help(HoverMenuExtender): This control will provide help information regarding the info that is being requested in the textbox on a donation/need page.
Watermark TextBox: The typical purpose of a watermark is to provide more information to the user about the TextBox itself without cluttering up the rest of the page. When a watermarked TextBox is empty, it displays a message to the user with a custom CSS style. Once the user has typed some text into the TextBox, the watermarked appearance goes away.
– In the end, users that come to Aidmatrix in a disaster situation – or those with limited computer experience, can be guided by the GenX controls to master the application quickly and get to the business of moving humanitarian aid to those in need.
Michael Ross, VP - Delivery &
Manish Misri, Solution Architect
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