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Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 7:07 am
by butte
Agree, No. 2. Reasons: the more readily readable; the less likely to invite .css tinkering to try to fix it (with no idea how subtly admin styling happens to be not a good thing to mess with lightly); and, yeah, the more familiar.

This far down the page or thread all that surprises me is that nobody asked for something to flip the choice on the fly. Well trained, admin comes one way, stays that way.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 9:28 am
by inactiveaccount9912
I for one love the sidebar, tho I understand everybody's point with space I just dont think its gonna be a problem on desktops, and on mobiles I guess it will only be triggered by the push of the menu button. Plus as a sidebar I guess youll keep it locked while scrolling on the page so the user allways has the menu. I know it could be done if it were horizontal but that in my opinion would be a waste of space. Vertically there are allready lots of things that take up space, the desktop bar , atleast 2 browser bars, horizontally allmost allways has more space so why not take advantage.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 2:19 pm
by Daniel
thanks guys! I know the direction to go in now.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 2:53 pm
by butte
Daniel, I just now noticed a tiny detail that's important, the copyright notice needs to say 2009-2014 (-2013 in the images).

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 4:15 pm
by versu
Daniel wrote:the horizontal space will not be there when shrink it down on a mobile!
But its not secret, that 80-90% of opencart's admin part users - usual managers, they are using usual desktops and notebooks with keyboard and mouse, so I think, we need to pay more attention for those people.
Anyway, you could take a Solomonic solution and make that menu bar vertical for mobile users, and horizontal for everyone else. Here is some statisitc from my site, as you could see, % of mobile users is still low:
111111Clipboard01.jpg

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Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 5:20 pm
by Xyph3r
Yes..the mobile users number is lower..but I don't think the sidebar will influence the usability on big screens

+1 for flo's answer

@butte - I thing that's the least important thing right now.

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 11:40 pm
by madimar
I'm not a mobile user, more a laptop user but also desktop user. I can assure you that, especially customer list has a lot of columns and it can become even wider using some useful extensions showing other columns/fields.
In this case, even with a good desktop display the problem is present. Each time you need to edit /view a customer profile you need to scroll right...
If we consider laptops and tablets are widely used today, IMHO horizontal space is fundamental. This is my humble opinion actually. Then, we can continue to live even with a vertical menu bar... This is sure
M

Inviato dal mio X909 utilizzando Tapatalk

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 1:26 am
by labeshops
While mobile is certainly a consideration for the front end of the stores, how many of us actually access the admin from a tablet or cell phone? I know I don't - even on my tablet, it's too much of a pita other than for a quick check of sales or something for the day - actual processing/shipping/adding products is best done otherwise. Most admins I think will be using keyboards/mice on either a laptop or a desktop.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 4:28 am
by versu
labeshops wrote:While mobile is certainly a consideration for the front end of the stores, how many of us actually access the admin from a tablet or cell phone? I know I don't - even on my tablet, it's too much of a pita other than for a quick check of sales or something for the day - actual processing/shipping/adding products is best done otherwise. Most admins I think will be using keyboards/mice on either a laptop or a desktop.
Absolutely agree, and I see this situation every day in my store. That's what I mean in my last message here, its not so important to make admin-part of opencart responsive, but if we are doing that, it will be a mistake to forget or to pay less attention to desktop's and notebook's users.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 10:48 pm
by fisher05
No 1s blue header bar on No 2 would be nice.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:06 am
by DSGI
Just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. Since it's built on bootstrap why not use the media queries to determine when it's a side bar and when it's a top header bar.

Personally (which means almost noting because this is just the way I like things) I think it makes sense to make the admin as functional for ALL devices as possible. I've seen a lot of sites these days incorporating mobile UI elements into desktop designs and I think we've gone a little overboard on the "Mobile design" craze. Lots of people still use desktops and mobile devices. I personally have a desktop, a laptop, an android tablet, an ipad, and an android phone - I use each of them for viewing my site and surfing the web. I hate it when I see a site that is specifically geared towards one type of device only! It's not difficult to make a site user friendly for all device types with bootstrap (I know because I've done in on about 5 sites and I'm a complete novice when it comes to code/development).

Bottom line I don't think it would decrease user experience to put the navigation on the header for desktop/loptop screens (col-md or col-lg) and then have the navigation as a sidebar on tablets and mobile phones. In fact I believe it would be an improvement to the UX because I've got the 2.0 dev version on a local server on my laptop and I find myself constantly scrolling left to right (which is a total pain in the a**) to see all the data I've put in for testing on pages like the product and customer pages.

Thanks!

DSGI (DS-MATT)

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:39 pm
by tophat
Nice to see the modern direction the design is going towards which I like a lot. Reminds me of mailchimp admin which is the neatest I've seen recently and a glimpse of the future movement towards.

Regarding the design, I also prefer the menu options on top (light versions always like gmail/youtube). The MAIN reason being is that it is familiar to the current versions. We have many staff and users working with opencart admin and if it's drastically different then we'll have to spend a lot of time teaching everyone the 'new way'. This now goes for 10,000 of existing users right...

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 1:26 am
by flangefrog
fisher05 wrote:No 1s blue header bar on No 2 would be nice.
+1, I think the dark sidebar on No 2 is a little too high contrast, and the logo looks a lot better in No 1.

I think it's a lot better to have the bar on the side on desktops as they have a lot more horizontal space to spare than vertical space. On mobiles the menu would be better on the top and only expanding when the button is pressed.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2014 5:39 am
by damagedspoon
labeshops wrote:While mobile is certainly a consideration for the front end of the stores, how many of us actually access the admin from a tablet or cell phone? I know I don't - even on my tablet, it's too much of a pita other than for a quick check of sales or something for the day - actual processing/shipping/adding products is best done otherwise. Most admins I think will be using keyboards/mice on either a laptop or a desktop.
Found this while actually searching for a responsive admin dash, so I figured I'd throw my two cents in.

The only reason I don't use the admin MORE from my tablet and cell phone is because it's dreadfully cumbersome to navigate on those devices. I do a good bit of work from the admin dash without the responsive capability already, but it would make my life infinitely easier if the dash was responsive. I add products, adjust inventory, etc. on the go. I sell through a few third party avenues, and to try to avoid backorders, I like to update my inventory as soon as I get a third party order in.

Processing and shipping, I agree, are easier handled from a laptop or desktop.

I just wouldn't discredit the notion as something most users don't want/need. I am a younger business owner (early 20s), and the power of mobile business operations is pretty overwhelming.

Just my two cents.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:05 pm
by OpenCart Addons
I like the styling of No. 2. I also agree that making the nav bar horizontal in the header for desktop/laptop users and sidebar for tablet/mobile users is the way to go.

The biggest issue is the scrolling left to right as mentioned previously.

Other than that it looks good.



Cheers,
Joel.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Fri May 09, 2014 12:24 am
by American
While these responsive themes are great it's the functionality I'm more concerned with. I've been an OC user for quite some time but the backend is what kills me.

Natively OC should support things like tax reporting (reporting in general needs improvement, you can't supply us with too many reporting tools), I can't even search for a customer by city (or take your pick), products should be broken down by category so I'm not having to filter or scroll through pages of products to edit one. I'd like more usable info on my dashboard. PrestaShop (get ready to pay big $$ for additional modules) has a pretty good backend http://www.prestashop.com/en/demo click on Customers then a particular customer (John Doe) and you get a really good overview of that customer and their history. Their search function hits everything in the backend.. products, customers, etc. If I go in to OC now and you want me to find a customer from Boston I can't do it... I better know his name or email.

Don't make me go add mods to give me full WYSIWYG buttons/menus, auto updating pricing when options are selected, getting my logos to show up in email receipts, producing pdf invoices and so forth. These should be basic things and are in most cart solutions...even free.

Remember, we are operating businesses here, it's not just the act of selling products but everything that goes on in the background. I need better tools to help run my business which is ALL handled right now via OC. I've been doing business online since 1996, started off with OSC and have used several others before OC, this is how I earn a living but before I go pay for a commercial solution I'd rather see OC improve it's business tools (which I'd pay for as well).

Maybe a Pro or B2B fork or whatever. My point is that I like OC and prefer to keep using it, I'm familiar with the code now, how it works and am comfortable using it. Support via the forums works well and has a good following. It just works. All good reasons to keep using it if I can.

Just my opinion and only worth what you paid for it.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Fri May 09, 2014 2:04 pm
by Tanzi
I don't mind sidebars I just don't like the black and I find the blue too bright could opencart logo be like on here and the sidebar shaded light grey?

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Fri May 09, 2014 11:58 pm
by American
As far as colors, most of your responsive type templates can incorporate a color/theme selector, create a handful of basic color css files, add to the selector and you can have about any color you want.

I've attached a screen shot of an application we are working on for the oil/gas industry. It uses pretty much the same template and you can see how this works including the collapsible side menu which is nice for additional screen real estate.

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2014 3:57 am
by trinkaljuneja
Daniel wrote:thanks guys! I know the direction to go in now.
How about giving both and select admin template also

Re: OpenCart Admin Designs

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2015 12:07 am
by strato
After just recently going from 1.5.5.1 to 2.0.3.1, I can definitely say #2 is easier on the eyes. I find the links in the dark gray side bar a little straining on my eyes after a bit. Love the new layout though!!