Overview: mTAB User Interface
Portal
The mTAB home page is the screen every user sees when they first log in to mTAB. This page is their access point to all aspects of the mTAB system.
To explain the look of this page, let’s break it down by its features:
Header Menu
This is the small menu to the top right and only has 2 items on it, which are fairly self explanatory.
- Contact Us – brings user to the contact form to send a message to mTAB.
- Logout – simply logs the user out and returns the user to the main login screen.
Main Menus This is the main menu that runs across the top of the screen with 6 items and is a dual layered system, with main menu headings across the top and sub-menu items dropping down below them.
*My mTAB Desktop - will return the user to this home screen
- Launch mTAB - will open the mTAB application
- Support-includes the helpdesk and FAQ*Manage Resources
- Tools – includes change password and notification preferences
- Admin
Which sub-menu items are available when an item is selected will depend on the user’s access level. Below the main menu, there is the mTAB’s user’s identification and the last date of access. The rest of the page includes four categories in a sidebar menu.
- mTAB Reports
- Dashboards
- All Tabs - This lists all tabs that the user has access to in their folder structure.
- Video Tutorials - This includes a variety of mTAB tutorial videos for the client.
Double-Clicking on an item in any of these lists will open that item directly in to mTAB. Application
Over the course of it's existence, mTAB has not only grown in terms of it's functionality, but also in the presentation of it's User Interface. In the last few years alone, great focus has been given to continually improving mTAB's visual appeal, perfecting the placement of popular functions and generally enhancing the overall user experience.
The most recent enhancement, comes with the addition of the Ribbon Menu concept to the mTAB environment. Ribbons allow for a moreorganized approach to functional placement and are of course, more visually appealing. The main Question View ribbon (seen below) houses allof the most commonly used functions, such as saving tabs, subsetting, formatting or recoding questions, along with the ability to actually run thetab.
The Run function itself has been enhanced, by bringing the Run Tab, Run Verbatim and Batch Run options together and housing them all underneath the Run button.
Each option becomes actively available whenever the relevant questions or tabs have been selected. (Batch Run is active when multiple save tabs are selected in the MyTabs view)
If the current tab contains both verbatim and coded questions, then the Run Tab and Run Verbatim options are available in the question, spreadsheet and verbatim views and it is now possible to move directly from the verbatim view to the spreadsheet view and vice-versa.
The large, stylized M in the top left of the screen forms the mTAB File menu. Here we find functions such as New, Open, Save, Slice and Logout. This is also the home of the recently added Export Nest option.
The Open option keeps track of your recently used tabs and as you hover over the Open item, lists them in the gray box to the right, allowing quick and easyaccess to commonly used items.
One of other nice benefits with the addition of ribbon menus is the Quick Launch area. In the top left of the software you will see 3 small icons.
This is the quick launch panel and it remains in view no matter where in the mTAB system you may navigate. This is a huge benefit, as no matter which view, ribbon or sub-ribbon you may be in, you will always be able to get back to the Question View, Spreadsheet View or Run the tab with a single click.
This will be especially useful for such items as the TopN or Simplified Datasheet views, which previously forced the user to navigate back to the mainspreadsheet before going anywhere.
As with other software packages, the ribbon menus within each view are split up in to sub-ribbons, allowing the functions to be organized in a logicalmanner. Within the question view, you will see sub-ribbons for View, Create and Help, as shown below.
Within the main Spreadsheet view, we have very much focused on bringing commonly used functions to the fore. Such items as Sort,Threshold, Suppress, Freeze Titles, Simplified Datasheet and Change Question Response Order have all been added to the ribbon, ensuring users have these tools right at their fingertips.
As with all views in mTAB, the Verbatim view has a ribbon all of it's own. This provides easy access to the Tag Cloud functionality, the ability to export the report to Excel and through the new Run button, the abilty to rerun the verbatim report (with pre-filters if required) or to run the closed end data tab itself.
The efficient design of the mTAB user interface is a vital part of your user experience. We hope you will find our current design intuitive and should you have any suggestions for the future, we always welcome your input.
