Background
We are one of those organizations that has not (yet) fully embraced Markdown-based documentation and API-driven integrations. Instead, we operate with an external document management system.
As a result, Eramba effectively serves as our ISMS, while the Policy Items are primarily references that link to the actual policies stored in our document management system.
This setup is, of course, the natural outcome of organizational separation of responsibilities, internal politics, quality management structures, IT, information security, and probably a few additional committees nobody remembers creating. But that’s beside the point. I’m sure we’re not the only company proudly representing this level of digital maturity.
The Challenge
As a former Security Engineer who now works in GRC, I can’t help but notice every workflow that takes five clicks when I know it could realistically take one.
Normally, this would be a minor annoyance.
However, once you multiply those extra clicks by the number of policies, reviews, audits, and administrative tasks performed over an entire year, it becomes a surprisingly significant amount of time spent… clicking.
Sometimes I even get the strange feeling that I dreamt the previous night about sitting on a beach, managing my ISMS entirely inside Jira and Confluence, where opening a document (page) strangely somehow required less effort than making a coffee.
The current workflow looks roughly like this:
Control Catalog → Policies
- Select checkbox
- Click “View”
- Wait until the Window has finished resizing, because in the meantime you tried to klick the View-Link but it managed to evade the cursor.
- Click the actual “View” Link
- Document opens
Proposal
I believe the productivity of every ISO working with Eramba could be significantly improved with a few relatively small UI/UX optimizations.
The desired workflow would look like this:
Ideally, it should simply be:
- Click the document cell (Control Catalog → Polciies → Documentname)
- Document opens
Request
I have two requests.
First, I would encourage the Eramba team to introduce UX analytics (I’m sure there’s a proper industry term for “measuring how often users are forced to click the same button”). Understanding where users repeatedly perform unnecessary interactions could provide valuable insights for improving the product.
More importantly, my actual feature request is this:
Please allow users to open the linked document simply by clicking the corresponding table cell.
Besides saving countless clicks, this would also make it much easier to delegate ISMS responsibilities to other teams, such as IT. At the moment, colleagues regularly end up asking me:
“How did you find the policy link again?”
It would be nice if the answer wasn’t “Years of training.”
P.S.
This post intentionally contains a little humor and sarcasm. The posting guidelines explicitly encouraged writing something engaging, so I considered myself officially authorized.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Hopefully, I’m not the only one who has sacrificed countless clicks to the UI gods, and a few fellow sufferers will support this request with an upvote.
