e-survey Forum

Is it just me or is anyone else bugged by these ridiculous prompts that tell you "this will take 7 seconds to process. Do you want to continue?"
If you can't spare seven seconds (or some other stupidly short time) then what the heck are you doing on LoL?
Seriously - can we have these prompts only when they needed. That is put a minimum time on them - warn us when it is going to take, say five or ten minutes.
The time stated is of course only that of the last transaction (or so)so is probably pretty irrelevant to what you are about to do anyway.

Thankyou for this suggestion, however it is important to have some warning so that users don't log out before a process is completed.
Your comments have been added to the Landonline enhancement/prioritisation list. LINZ is currently looking at ways to make this list more accessible to surveyors. We will be working with stakeholder representatives during the development of the list and on how to best communicate it to the survey community, given its complexity.

Has anyone had a prevalidation take 5 minutes? I would assume that if you click the prevalidation button then you want it to run, and aren't going to shut down LOL straight away.

A simple solution which should keep both sides happy would be to display a message, without an "OK" button, while starting the process. The message window can then be automatically killed once the process is completed. If necessary, to avoid the user looking at a static message screen, an animated "working..." indicator could be used.

Further to my above comment. I have just done a pre-validation, and note that the mouse pointer changes to an hourglass icon. That makes my comments above a bit redundant, and I would have thought that was sufficient in itself.

I feel that the prompt serves the purpose of informing the user that they are about to initiate a non-instantaneous process, which is important in interface design. You'd feel the same if you accidentally clicked the Prevalidate button (you may think this is unlikely, but remember that cynicism next time you make a silly mistake on your computer - it happens!) on a huge survey and had Landonline tied up for the next 5 minutes, with no opportunity to cancel or retract the request.

As I understand it, the predicted wait shown in the prompt is an average of the time taken by the previous x amount (5, perhaps) of prevalidations that have been run. So the prediction is not taking into account the complexity of your survey - it's more an index of the prevalidation server's current load, shifted by the average complexity of the past five surveys to have run prevalidation.

In that light it can be seen that it's not of great practical use (in terms of accuracy), however the fact that most prevalidations for regular-sized surveys take less than 30 seconds means that it doesn't matter a great deal anyway.

But ideally the time-prediction would take the complexity of the survey into account (via some kind of quick calc), in order to provide a more accurate guess. Even more ideally (in a crazy world where interfaces were actually customised to suit user's wishes) there would be an option to toggle the prompt on or off for a given survey - which would keep everybody happy.

Riki, your points are noted, and as you point out, this is really only an issue with very large surveys. However, from your initial point, if the intention is to warn users of initiating non-instantaneous processes, then such warnings should surely be used before:

- zooming out too far in spatial view (depending on layers turned on, etc)(how many times have I accidentally zoomed out, then had to walk away in disgust while the computer catches up, even after pressing ESC?);

- entering plan layout (I know I have accidentally clicked plan layout, then had to wait for it all to process, before backing out to go into Maintain Diagram Layers).

There are probably other instances where such prompts would be just as useful as at pre-validation, but these two spring to mind (and apply regardless of the size of the survey), and no warning is given here. The first also applies to e-searches, which are more likely to be performed by less frequent users who would be even more appreciative of a warning. Perhaps this could be added to the wish list, if others think it useful?