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6:47 am
December 23, 2014
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This is a follow-up from discussions, here, over the past few months. ProTrak has been around nearly 21 years and over these years has acquired some pretty advanced options and procedures. A comment has been that "For someone new to ProTrak these may be a bit overwhelming."
This was brought home, again, when I was adding the "Start train" feature (you haven't see this yet).
Recently, I have been using the "session number" to 'hide' or 'lock-out' use of some features, usually 20 sessions before a feature is active. ( But then I get questions about why something is "grayed out" (or greyed out). )
I am looking for your feedback, please:
a) Is this really an issue?
b) If so, is disabling, or hiding, features the way to go?
c) What features of ProTrak do you find on the more advanced side? (Imagine yourself a brand new user.)
d) Your thoughts?
Many thanks,
Jim
8:30 am
April 26, 2015
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>b) If so, is disabling, or hiding, features the way to go?<
Jim,
I ran 500+ paper session over the years since I first purchased ProTrak. So any session-number-based feature certainly would have kicked in long ago. BUT when I started doing real OP sessions on my layout I reset the session counter to 1.
Your thoughts wrt making ProTrak less intimidating for new users is commendable. For example the Andy / Bob requested capability to change a Yd yard to a Y yard during a session is certainly something a new user would have no familiarity with the need to do. Maybe a good alternative would be to have a Basic / Advanced radio button on one of the opening screens and then a notification that the user is running ProTrak - Basic, or ProTrak - Advanced. Then you could control which features are enable via this setting. In fact you could actually extend this a little and have several "levels" of Advanced.
Joe
11:22 am
April 26, 2015
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Jim
My personal observations. If a new user can resist the urge to throw everything at the program at once, and start in with one train and run it until they understand what is happening and then add another one and see how they interact, this will go a long way in their understanding of how Protrak works. Since I have a relatively small railroad with only about 100 cars, I have had few problems over the years with understanding what was happening by adopting this procedure. How you convince someone to take it slow and easy may not be the easiest thing to do. Once Protrak is up and running the way you want it to, making wholesale changes to industry spots, etc. can also cause a lot of misery. Again, one at a time can save a lot of frustration and grief. Convincing folks to do this seems to be against human nature. Good luck
Fred
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