UX Discussion

[Crazy-Unicooorn]

I wanted to kickstart discussion about the user experience of the app (great app btw!)

With an ever growing support of delivery services, we're going to need a better option that the simple dropdown, to select the service when adding a parcel to track.

• Could the service be automatically inferred from the ID? (maybe the way they look can tell what service it is attached to? length, characters…) that would allow to auto-select correct service
• Add support for searching service with keyboard input?
• Add categories? (Worldwide, Europe, France, Germany…)

Any other idea? Let's discuss!

[itsvic-dev]

Could the service be automatically inferred from the ID?

This is already kind of done, but it's supported only by a few backends:

The way this works is it will put the services that do match this ID at the very top. I'm wary of auto selection because there are a handful of formats (e.g. EMS tracking numbers) which will be supported by multiple delivery services (any national postal service, for example¹).

Add support for searching service with keyboard input?

This would be helpful, yeah.

Add categories? (Worldwide, Europe, France, Germany…)

This would be nice, but what concerns me is what should we do in the case of services which aren't exactly worldwide, but which support multiple regions? For example, PostNord (currently not supported but tracked under #46) operates in multiple Nordic countries under the same brand name (in contrast to e.g. Sameday, which has separate entries for Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary).

Footnotes

1. What makes this even more tricky in the case of EMS numbers is that they contain the origin country, but not the destination country, so auto selection based on the country code in the EMS number would lead to possibly incorrect results when dealing with international parcels, say, a parcel coming from the US to PL. In this example, we would propose USPS, although what the user will most likely prefer is Poczta Polska instead. ↩

[Zan1456]

I'm working on navbar and service categories.