I'm forging on, trying to do more work backtesting some simple strategies and have found another string of irritations and road blocks by the User Interface.
Some of these suggestions will help new users find their way through the tooling without having to spend an hour watching videos and reading a manual. The bigger problems are with the workflow itself which makes simple tasks needlessly painful and complex.
Here's yet another list of the simple yet maddening problems I've found today:
- In the Strategy Analyzer there is a list of instruments. It would sure be nice to have a quick instrument insert/delete without going through the Instrument manager. I just want to enter in a symbol name and instrument type and have everything else use defaults. Instead it's another several minutes checking and double checking all the menus in all the windows looking for that one magic tool hidden under, where else, file > new.
You can't even right-click and go "New" - this option seems to be forever disabled, and "Edit" just edits the selected instrument. (I see much later that if you "right click on an instrument list > right click > Edit..." you can get to the Instrument Manager, but that's really obscure and really hidden, certainly for new users. Crazy.)
- I don't understand why some tools like Strategy Analyzer are under "tools" and some are under "File > New". It makes many things hard to find (who would think to look under "File > New" to look for the strategy analyzer, which doesn't edit anything and doesn't create anything new at all?)
- I really don't understand why creating a new Indicator or new strategy isn't "File > New > Strategy" but is instead "Tools > New NinjaScript > Strategy". These menus seem really messed up. Even after using NT for a week, it still takes me a long time to search for things, and I had to watch some videos to even figure out that there was a Strategy Analyzer. You need an inch of documentation just to figure out how to fight all of the UI roadblocks.
- In the Instrument Manager, if you enter in a Name to search and click "Enter", you expect it to search but instead the Instrument Manager disappears! Argh! Looks like the "Enter" is being trapped by the "OK" button which is not what a casual user would expect. When you're using the dialog, you'll click "search" dozens of times and "OK" only once - OK does NOT need the selection focus! Can you fix that?
- Also in the Instrument Manager, the left/right arrow keys are in the details box and not beside the table with all the stocks. Again, this is very weird. What do arrows have to do with the exchange or strike price? With no arrow keys beside the search result, my first reaction was to double-click the stocks, but again this pulls up an edit dialog! Weird, weird, weird. The arrows should be beside the search results (and consider enabling drag-n-drop or something).
- In the Instrument Manager, when you click "Delete" under the list of instruments, it does something weird and looks like it deletes the Instrument List (or at least clears it). Very, very weird. I've no idea what's going on but I really don't understand it, and I don't like it. It shouldn't be affecting the Instrument List.
- When Creating a new Instrument, put all of the required information into the first tab. When you go to create an instrument, it complains about some "symbol mapping", which leads you to a second tab and rooting around through strange sub properties. At the very least, when we enter in a symbol, pick an intelligent default (like the symbol name!) (And while you're at it, might as well have the Exchange 'default' selected by default so we don't have to go rooting around for that also.)
- After creating an Instrument, it's a pretty safe bet that we're going to want to add it to an Instrument List, but the Search list gets refreshed back to all of the Instruments (even if we just ran a search for this very instrument). The new instrument should be displayed prominently, or the last search re-ran, it probably shouldn't default to *all* instruments.
To get a sense of what this is like, try building an instrument list with 20-30 Instruments, half of which aren't in the database. It's tedious, frustrating, involving way too many dialogs and buttons and again, it can't be done with just a keyboard.
Try this: run QuoteTracker and look at how they add an instrument to their watchlist. You can add a large string separated by spaces or commas, and it tries to make an intelligent gues as to the default values. If it can't, you can edit each individual row. You don't even need to use the mouse - <INS> launches their "Add Symbol(s)" dialog. Why does NinjaTrader make this simple, common function so difficult?
QT takes six keystrokes and no mouse to enter BIDU (INS - 'BIDU' - ENTER). NT takes maybe 30 times that many but I don't want to count. It's maddening that such a common, simple task should be so difficult!
- After a build of a strategy, the StrategyAnalyzer selection goes back to "Default", adding just another layer of hoops to jump through to run a strategy. It should stay on your last selection. (And there should be a button "backtest with last options" to cut out another useless dialog box.)
Some of these suggestions will help new users find their way through the tooling without having to spend an hour watching videos and reading a manual. The bigger problems are with the workflow itself which makes simple tasks needlessly painful and complex.
Here's yet another list of the simple yet maddening problems I've found today:
- In the Strategy Analyzer there is a list of instruments. It would sure be nice to have a quick instrument insert/delete without going through the Instrument manager. I just want to enter in a symbol name and instrument type and have everything else use defaults. Instead it's another several minutes checking and double checking all the menus in all the windows looking for that one magic tool hidden under, where else, file > new.
You can't even right-click and go "New" - this option seems to be forever disabled, and "Edit" just edits the selected instrument. (I see much later that if you "right click on an instrument list > right click > Edit..." you can get to the Instrument Manager, but that's really obscure and really hidden, certainly for new users. Crazy.)
- I don't understand why some tools like Strategy Analyzer are under "tools" and some are under "File > New". It makes many things hard to find (who would think to look under "File > New" to look for the strategy analyzer, which doesn't edit anything and doesn't create anything new at all?)
- I really don't understand why creating a new Indicator or new strategy isn't "File > New > Strategy" but is instead "Tools > New NinjaScript > Strategy". These menus seem really messed up. Even after using NT for a week, it still takes me a long time to search for things, and I had to watch some videos to even figure out that there was a Strategy Analyzer. You need an inch of documentation just to figure out how to fight all of the UI roadblocks.
- In the Instrument Manager, if you enter in a Name to search and click "Enter", you expect it to search but instead the Instrument Manager disappears! Argh! Looks like the "Enter" is being trapped by the "OK" button which is not what a casual user would expect. When you're using the dialog, you'll click "search" dozens of times and "OK" only once - OK does NOT need the selection focus! Can you fix that?
- Also in the Instrument Manager, the left/right arrow keys are in the details box and not beside the table with all the stocks. Again, this is very weird. What do arrows have to do with the exchange or strike price? With no arrow keys beside the search result, my first reaction was to double-click the stocks, but again this pulls up an edit dialog! Weird, weird, weird. The arrows should be beside the search results (and consider enabling drag-n-drop or something).
- In the Instrument Manager, when you click "Delete" under the list of instruments, it does something weird and looks like it deletes the Instrument List (or at least clears it). Very, very weird. I've no idea what's going on but I really don't understand it, and I don't like it. It shouldn't be affecting the Instrument List.
- When Creating a new Instrument, put all of the required information into the first tab. When you go to create an instrument, it complains about some "symbol mapping", which leads you to a second tab and rooting around through strange sub properties. At the very least, when we enter in a symbol, pick an intelligent default (like the symbol name!) (And while you're at it, might as well have the Exchange 'default' selected by default so we don't have to go rooting around for that also.)
- After creating an Instrument, it's a pretty safe bet that we're going to want to add it to an Instrument List, but the Search list gets refreshed back to all of the Instruments (even if we just ran a search for this very instrument). The new instrument should be displayed prominently, or the last search re-ran, it probably shouldn't default to *all* instruments.
To get a sense of what this is like, try building an instrument list with 20-30 Instruments, half of which aren't in the database. It's tedious, frustrating, involving way too many dialogs and buttons and again, it can't be done with just a keyboard.
Try this: run QuoteTracker and look at how they add an instrument to their watchlist. You can add a large string separated by spaces or commas, and it tries to make an intelligent gues as to the default values. If it can't, you can edit each individual row. You don't even need to use the mouse - <INS> launches their "Add Symbol(s)" dialog. Why does NinjaTrader make this simple, common function so difficult?
QT takes six keystrokes and no mouse to enter BIDU (INS - 'BIDU' - ENTER). NT takes maybe 30 times that many but I don't want to count. It's maddening that such a common, simple task should be so difficult!
- After a build of a strategy, the StrategyAnalyzer selection goes back to "Default", adding just another layer of hoops to jump through to run a strategy. It should stay on your last selection. (And there should be a button "backtest with last options" to cut out another useless dialog box.)
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