Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
At present, the search features to add a new merit badge counselor to a scout gives me two buttons. One to “Lookup/Invite Counselor” or “[Scout]'s Connections.”
As a Scout leader having two buttons is a poor UX experience. I would expect in a lookup to be able to live search a database. Instead, I’m presented a populated list of the counselors for that merit badge within x number of miles who are available with no way to filter the list down to a manageable size other than to change the pre-existing filters.
As a scout leader, I want to have ONE button to lookup/invite or add a merit badge counselor/connection where I can type into a text field the MBC’s name or email and get a live search of registered adults within Scoutbook. Additionally, I’d like “filters” that generate a list of counselors - if I don’t know who I specifically want to add - where the text field would now live filter through the filter-generated list as I type a name, email, city, or unit information.
Merge the two and give us a better User eXperience.
The Lookup/Invite Counselor is coming from the Feature Assistant Extension for Chrome and FIrefox. This feature allows you to search for a MBC and adds an Invite button to each MBC in the search results.
The base Scoutbook function is to first click on Lookup Counselor. This takes you to the MBC search page where you write down the information of the Counselor you want to connect. You then return to the MB page where you can click on the Scout’s Connection button to add the Counselor.
We agree the user interface can be improved in this area. I believe the reason there are 2 buttons is because if you know the name of the Counselor you want to add, you can go directly there without searching. Since the search and invite functions are separate in base Scoutbook, two buttons make sense.
There is an item in the backlog to improve how connections to MBCs are made in Scoutbook. At this time I do not know when it will be scheduled for development.
