GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 773945
Select Security Dialog Not User Friendly
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:51:53 UTC
When a user is creating a new Commodity account, they must select the security to be used for the account. The dialog for this account, however, requires the user to first select the type of security before they can select the actual security. This is unnecessary, since the security by definition is associated with a particular type. Moreover, it forces the user to know beforehand the type of a security, which is not always known. It would be preferable to have this dialog simply select by security ticker symbol.
The category box is there to narrow the list of securities, which is very useful when one has had a lot of securities over the years. We could default to an "All" selection for those with short lists or poor memory.
John, my criticism stands. The category is a poor choice for limiting this list. In the account entry process, a user is more likely to know the security name or its ticker than they are going to know the category to which it belongs (quick--which category does TXN belong to?). The initial limitation by category means that if a user doesn't know this category, they must hunt through every category to find the security. It is true that many ticker symbols are not intuitive ("T" stands for AT&T, for example), but it would still be preferable for this box NOT to use category as its limiter. Perhaps the dialog should use the security name instead?
I have no way of knowing into what category you assigned TXN. If you mean on what exchange does TXN trade, well, I know that TXN trades on the NASDAQ because you brought it up in an email the other day. It's a bit unusual: A three-or-fewer-letter ticker usually indicates a stock that trades on the NYSE. But that's immaterial. The categories (aside from CURRENCY) are entirely user-driven. If you want to have a "Tech Stock" category for TXN, AAPL, GOOG, and HPQ instead of assigning them to the exchanges on which they trade, you may. The category list is pre-seeded with some primary exchanges*, but you can use whatever you want and assign any stock to any of them. It has absolutely no effect other than to limit the list in the security combo box in that dialog and to sort the securities in the security and price editors. It *is* true that if the user forgets which category to which they assigned the security then they'll have to hunt for it, which is why I suggested a default "All" choice in the category combo-box. I suppose that wouldn't help in the security or price editors, so perhaps we need a ticker search function on those dialogs. I don't agree that we should do away with categories, nor remove the category combo box from the security selector dialog. I've invested in several hundred stocks over the years and even with categories the ticker combo list is quite cumbersome (meaning that I need to create new categories. Hmm... A-Z would probably work well). Yes, I could see a UI benefit to having a radio button that switches the security combo box between ticker and company name. * The pre-selected exchanges, AMEX, ASE, CURRENCY, EUREX, FUND, NASDAQ, and NYSE are arguably too euro-american centric and too limited. I wouldn't be opposed to having as defaults only CURRENCY and SHARES, leaving the user to invent whatever categories she needs and only if she actually needs to break up the list some more.
Perhaps I am missing something, but I think you're missing my point. I never said anything about doing away with categories*. I have only raised a UI issue, targeting the UI on a particular dialog. And forcing the user IN THIS DIALOG to first designate the category in order to find a particular security in their GnuCash file is counter intuitive. You are forcing her to search for something she KNOWS (the security name or ticker symbol) using something she may not (the arbitrary category name). Simply, that is bad design. Even with several hundred securities (I have 185 or so), it seems to me that with type ahead behavior, this list would quickly diminish to a short list. It's good enough for the Accounts dialog, why wouldn't it suffice for securities? * Although, now that you mention it, that might not be a bad idea--or at least change the field to be optional. But that would be a different bug.
I've already said--twice--that the simple solution is to provide a default setting of "All" to the category combo. How does that not accomplish your goal?
Sorry. I had a different solution in mind. Your solution will work, assuming that "All" in this dialog is defined as "Every type except CURRENCY." I will look into changing the documentation so that at least this field is more clearly identified and explained for the user.
The set of categories differs depending on the account type in the account editor from which the dialog is launched; CURRENCY is the only one in the list unless the type is STOCK or FUND, otherwise it's all of the categories except CURRENCY. That wouldn't change, so yes, ALL wouldn't include currencies.
This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. I wound up making the string "ALL NON-CURRENCY" because the price entry dialog also presents "CURRENCY" as an option.
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