Doxpop - Tools for Attorneys and Public Information Researchers: CCS (minute entries) now displayed in reverse chronological order.

Friday, April 28, 2017

CCS (minute entries) now displayed in reverse chronological order.

Last night we made a little tweak to the court record system that is simple, but will make your life easier by saving you a couple of seconds on each case you look at.

Minute entries for cases are now listed in reverse chronological order, so you will see the most recent entry at the top, and oldest at the bottom.

For attorneys, this means what's happening now is the first thing you see.

For researchers, this means the judgment information you seek should be near the top instead of requiring you to scroll to the bottom.

No solution is perfect for everyone, so many of you will still need to navigate quickly through the entries. When you do this, remember that all web browsers have nice shortcuts you can use to quickly move to the desired entry:

  • The [Home] key (above the arrows on most keyboards) will position you at the top of the page.  On mini-keyboards, [fn]-[up-arrow] is used instead.
  • The [End] key (above the arrows on most keyboards) will position you at the bottom of the page.  On mini-keyboards, [fn]-[down-arrow] is used.
  • The [PgUp] and [PgDn] keys (above the arrows on most keyboards) will scroll up or down one screenful at a time.
  • To quickly find entries containing a particular word, press [Ctrl]-[F] and then start typing the word. You will be positioned on the first occurrence and all occurrences will be highlighted.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you please consider having an option to choose chronological or reverse chronological? Reverse chronological is not helpful at all for probation officers who are trying to type criminal histories into INcite from DoxPop, because court minutes are not one line per entry date. It is so much easier, and makes so much more sense to be able to read a page naturally, from top to bottom when we are trying to re-create criminal histories.

Nick Fankhauser said...

Would it work to have the "ccs view" in chronological order? That would require an extra click, but it also gets you into a view where you can more easily cut & paste if you need to copy sections over.

Anonymous said...

This is not ideal for screening companies that need to read through a docket in chronological order. If you were going to make a change like this, you should allow the user to select the view they would like, or allow the column to be sorted in either order, rather than default it to reverse chronological. You have more than one type of user. Please try to keep them ALL in mind.

Anonymous said...

It would be great to have the option of choosing between chronological and reverse chronological. So far, reverse chronological has not saved us any time as it isn't the way we're used to reading. There's too much confusion this way.

Anonymous said...

Our court likes Nick’s proposed “CCS View” allowing the list to appear in the order most desired by the user.

Nick Fankhauser said...

At the moment, we don't have the time to make the change that allows each user to choose which direction they want it to go individually, so we're going to take the approach of keeping it in reverse chrono order on the case details screen and in regular chrono order on the "CCS View".

We understand that this approach doesn't satisfy all users. Until we've got the option to let you each configure this individually, we can only look at the numbers and take the approach that satisfies the most users. I understand that this hurts those in the minority, and I'm sorry, but the perfect solution will have to wait.

For those that want the traditional chrono order, it will be one click away in the CCS view, as proposed above. I expect we'll make this change within a day.

In late summer we plan to implement some changes in the court system to allow scrolling through details without returning to the results list and reordering various data elements easily (similar to the tax warrant system.) When we do this, we'll make the minute order configurable.

Thanks for giving us so much feedback on this. It's not always fun to hear the negative comments, but that's so much better than silence!