Area Impacted:

Production

Request Summary: 

Our team would like to use the Breakdown production report to help with the assignment of tasks, but currently this report displays the tasks in one long list of data, all with the same design treatment, and with no visual indication even of where one task listing ends and the next begins. The report needs some design adjustments to make it readable and user-friendly enough to use.

Description/Use Cases: 

1. At the very least, additional line space needs to be added after the Completion line of one task and before the Title line of the next task, so that users can identify their tasks at a glance. Currently, a user could look for the Title and Completion lines to identify where each task starts and ends, but this is pretty cumbersome and is going to lead to user errors, especially if they need to go through a large number of tasks.

2. To a user, this report seems designed to answer the question, "When do I need to have [some upcoming task] done by?", so the End Date for each task should be much more obvious and much more clear. To that end:

- The Duration should be split into two separate lines, Start Date and End Date.

- All dates in this report should be displayed with the year last, not first as they are now, as the user is generally looking for immediately upcoming tasks, not tasks that are years out. Ideally the month would also be spelled out to prevent numerical day/month mixups: 12 May 2025 or similar.

3. Apart from the start/end dates, the most relevant data in this report is the book title, the task name, and the Completion button. The pub date and format are good to have in case there are different versions of a title being worked on at once, but these are of lesser importance and should be treated as such visually, either by eg. making them smaller than the other data or folding them into the Title line, in brackets.

Impact of limitation or missing feature:

The function of this report is great, but addressing these design issues will make it dramatically more usable. Appreciate your time on this.