Our time-tested interface for adding questions is simple, comfortable, and super easy to use. You can introduce new staff members to Gimlet and they “just get it” extremely fast. It’s intuitive and straightforward.

Gimlet v1 - Question Entry Form

So… How do you improve on all of that goodness? We have some GREAT ideas.

Gimlet v2 Question Entry Highlights

1) Site/Location

Our new design places these least frequently changing options outside of the main data entry form. You’ll sign into Gimlet, make sure your library branch and service point are properly selected, and you’ll basically never need to change them for the duration of your shift on the desk. Time saved for everyone.

2) Difficulty

Difficulty is an optional category in Gimlet and it will also be optional the Gimlet v2 – if you’re interested, an account administrator can toggle this feature on or off.

In Gimlet v1, the difficulty option was a set of radio button options below our tagging feature. In Gimlet v2, we’ve moved difficulty into the main form entry area, which makes using the option faster, and allows you to better label your difficulty levels. It streamlines the entire form, making it the same type of input as the other main categories. Again, this change will help to speed up data capture significantly.

3) Time and Date

It might not be well known, but Gimlet v1 has this feature where you can enter time as a spoken phrase: “1 hour ago”, “15 minutes ago”, “yesterday at 3pm”, etc. We also auto-increment the time of day per second, which is pretty nice most of the time, but it hides that today’s date is the assumed date.

No more. Enough being cute.

We’ve separated time input from date input in Gimlet v2. Now time works all by itself. You won’t get one of those silly data entry errors saying Gimlet doesn’t understand the time you entered. The date input also includes a native calendar picker, too. These changes will keep you accurate and raise your confidence as you enter data.

4) Tagging

Tagging helps everyone keep their data terse and accurate. A nice set of promoted tags helps make Gimlet easy and quick to use. Because of it’s importance, we’ve given the tag input area more prominence. Free-text tag entry is disabled by default, which will help cut down on all the “dvd” versus “dvds” tags in your data. And, if you do enable free-text entry, tags will now be comma separated (because that’s how most of us assume they’ll work). We’ve simplified the tag auto-suggestion and entry process, too.

So, ultimately, what is already a quick system to use at the desk today, will be a much, much faster system to use in the future. Sound good? Let me know what you think and drop a comment below!

Okok, that’s all for today. I’ll return next week to write a post about search improvements in Gimlet – something I’m thrilled about. Stay tuned!

Cheers,

  • Eric