/2 Enhancing Interaction – Introducing Menus & Workflow Refinement (Solidsight v3 & v4)

Improving User Experience

I realised early on that functionality alone wasn't enough; Solidsight needed an intuitive way for users to interact with generated reports. This led to the development of interactive command-line menus, providing users with easy navigation options and clear choices.

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Interactive Menu Implementation

The new menu allowed users to select specific analyses or regenerate outputs as needed:

pythonCopyEditdef main_menu(output_dir):
    while True:
        print("\n--- Main Menu ---")
        reports = [f for f in os.listdir(output_dir) if f.endswith("_analysis_report.md")]
        if not reports:
            print("No reports found in this directory.")
            break
        for idx, report in enumerate(reports, start=1):
            print(f"{idx}. {report.replace('_analysis_report.md', '')}")
        choice = input("Select a report by number or type 'exit': ")
        if choice.lower() == 'exit':
            break
        # additional logic here

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Navigating Initial Errors

Initially, the menu would crash if no reports existed or when invalid inputs were entered. It became clear that thorough input validation and better user prompts were essential.

Lessons Learned

Addressing these user-experience issues taught me to anticipate user behaviours better and ensure the program remained stable, irrespective of how it was used.

We will stop here, and I’ll see you on the next one.

pxng0lin.