Feedback: knime Evolution , UI&UX

Feedback & Ideas
1

Hi guys,

I have been using knime for about 6 years now.
The KAP, KS until 18 month ago, now also KBH.

This thread is not about the technical/functional evolution of knime, which I am very happy about - this is about (my personal) experience about the UI&UX.

Before I write pages and pages, I will try to keep it short and direct.

  • Stop making everything bigger, rounder and more colourful. The new Joiner for example…The older Joiner: using joins on 3,4,5,6 columns was no problem to set up (I mean the settings). Nicely NEXT to each other, left on left and right on right. Now…everything top down. That also means a LOT more scrolling than before in the node settings. Not just in the new Joiner, essentially in all new nodes; everything is bigger (no compact mode anymore).
    Please put the joined column pairs next to each Other again; remove the big borders, reduce the font size.
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    Please move the “merge join columns” up. Scrolling down every time to select it (that should be on by default anyway)…
    Having the compare values by: why not use just 1 row with drowdown next to it, not under.

The usability/my UX is suffering quite a lot.

Where have the domain infos/default values gone? Old Row Filter, used on a string column with a few values…no more dropdown.

Column Renamer, no more default value (old column name) starting from the second selected column. No more twin value list for easy/mass selection, instead again dropdowns with 5? visible columns to choose from…again endless scrolling to reach column number 35 or something bigger. The same as the Joiner.

modern UI: where is the tree view of the workspace? single folders only…I need to jump between worfklows all the time (opening new ones). Of course they are organized in different folders. Using windows-explorer-like navigation without a tree view simply takes way too much time.
Where is the mini map? zooming in and out then jumping to other parts of workflows? no, thank you.
Can I turn off the default visibility of table outputs on the bottom of the screen? My key_shortcut for “open first table output” in new window does not work in modern UI.
As you might have guessed, I don’t use the modern UI

Real life workflows (not the ones used in presentations) are not maximum 1 screen big, not everything is in colourful boxes etc. (hold down mouse selection is still not possible in boxes?)
Workflows are bigger, sometimes a lot bigger, they can look quite messy - but that does not mean they aren’t readable or documented.

In my opinion, the UI/UX development does ignore the fact that not every workflow is tiny with a few settings and maximum 10 columns in any table. (default dropdown length is now 7 columns? Imagine having 50-100 columns…I am going nuts scrolling through that)

With that last few updates that number of times I need to use the mousewheel within settings has easily doubled, if not a lot more.
Configuring settings takes more time than before, sometimes a lot more time - that is NOT user friendly. Please stop doing that.

Alternatively, is it possible to have kind of compact mode for settings etc. (closer to the classic versions of the settings)

As said before, I am really glad about many new nodes in knime, but everytime a new major version is released, my UX with the UI drops.

Best regards!

2

Hey @tgoedeke,

thanks for the feedback and nice to hear that you use KNIME for such a long time.

Let me comment on a few of these points.

  • We have plans to introduce an additional large mode for these dialogs that will make it easier to configure it for large amounts of columns. This will reduce the need for scrolling while keeping it working nicely in the side panels.
  • We recently changed the column renamer to always select the next available column and remove already renamed columns from the list of possible values. This solves your first point, but not yet the bulk adding and scrolling issue. We will further investigate how to improve that
  • We are still investigating how to improve the workflow/repository item selection.
  • Regarding the visibility of the bottom table, you can just collapse by resizing it. It might be that your key_shortcut doesn’t work anymore. We had to change a few of those as they wouldn’t work in a browser setup. There is a help entry that will show all available shortcuts (opening table should be alt + shift + enter)
  • We recently brought the minimap back :slight_smile:
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  • Not sure if increasing the available options in a dropdown makes it easier to use with lots of columns. The scroll needed is almost the same - the more you see in the list. For that case we introduced a search in all of our dropdowns, which should reduce the need for more entries.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we solved everything perfectly. We are always eager to improve and this is why we value these feedback topics a lot!

Greetings,
Daniel

2 Likes
3

Thank you for your detailed answer!

This one is more of a question, I guess:
Let’s call it “the copy/paste issue”. I copy some text somewhere (within KAP or not), open a config and want to paste it…What is being pasted looks like a really long hash (random letters/numbers, very long).

Is that just me or a known issue? If it’s known, then all good.

Is there any possibility to “inspect” rule based nodes (Rule Engine, Rule based row filter etc.) without executing the previous nodes?
Sometimes I just want to check the text in those nodes, without executing the workflow.
On one hand…it’s just text in there, on the other hand, I do see the validation of the text based rules. Some internal trigger like: “If validation not possible, just show text” might be useful.

Best regards and keep up the good work!

4

How do I get it back? I’m on 5.6 and can’t see an option to enable it in Modern UI… or will this come with 5.7?

As you can probably tell - this is a feature I am really missing in MUI :slight_smile:

5

You should get it starting from 5.6 if you switch to the WebGL (experimental) render mode :slight_smile:

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Greetings,
Daniel

2 Likes
6

Hey @tgoedeke,

I am not aware of both of the issues and I am not sure that I 100% understand the issues.

  1. I have never seen this, and I can copy and paste string into settings (as an example). Could you show a video that showcases the problem?
  2. Can’t you just double click the node to open the dialog even with non executed predecessors?
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Greetings,
Daniel

7

Thanks for the quick response - that is AWESOME!

1 Like
8

I think this can happen if you select a whole KNIME node then it will try to paste the full config into a text field. I think there are efforts to prevent this. Meantime solution: make sure you just copy text and now whole nodes.

9

Hi,
I was copying text from some MS Office, or even a knime table cell and it happened. Not nodes.
Maybe it’s simply a problem with “copy” not being applied correctly before (there are some issues with previewed files I know of (not from knime)).