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Request a Feature Report a Bug

Completed

Last Updated: 27 Jan 2020 17:10 by ADMIN

Jonathan

Created on: 26 Jan 2020 13:27

Category: KendoReact

Type: Feature Request

Global feedback after discovery of KendoReact

Hello,

I would like to make a general feedback after visiting KendoReact website for the first time. I'll expose a lot of wrongs, but keep in mind my goal is to give you insight for improvement, not to bash.

Context : I'm currently curating React UI frameworks for a new long term project within my company. I am a senior software architect seeking some general feelings about a the product (reliability and performance for example) but also very specific : easy layout management and very accomplished components such as Select.

Navigation

The documentation website ( https://www.telerik.com/kendo-react-ui/components ) is extraordinarily slow, this is very inconvenient when you're browsing to discover what the kit has to offer.

Accessing sub-section actually change the page, requiring a full reload, which again, is so slow I don't want to click on it. Seriously.
Take https://www.telerik.com/kendo-react-ui/components/dropdowns/multiselect/ for example, to discover all the features, I have to trigger several page load. This is not gonna happen ; I'll leave this. I did leave this. It's the most wanted component for me in my research. I left.

Content

The documentation pages does not expose the available properties of the component, I have to visit every sublink and read every source to find out. This is not ok either. I'm looking for a framework to save time, and this is starting to seriously leech my time.

The source code of the given examples are real. I can copy paste into an empty file, and it will work. This is the good side of the coin. The bad side of the coin is it takes me an, abnormal amount of time to see how the component is structured. That's the only thing that interest me on the first look. If I want deeper understanding and knowledge, yes please provide with a link to stackblitz or whatever so I can play with it, but first I want to see what it looks like.

You use unconventional naming. Look around in the js world, how people call stuff :

A form select is a select, not a dropdown. Within your dropdown menu item you have multi-select but you have to find it first !
A grid is a css grid, not a DataTable.
You have in your menu : Forms, Dropdown Select, Inputs, Upload. All of that is Form. How am I supposed to know if I've seen all form features if everything is spread around ? You also have Chart, Gauge and Drawing.
PanelBar ? Never heard of it. Accordion ? That's my boy.

You also present features that don't belong here, like Excel Export or PDF Processing whereas some basic information are missing such as "does it work well with TypeScript ?" : https://www.telerik.com/kendo-react-ui/knowledge-base/?search=typescript .

Features

You have a lot of components, some are very accomplished (i.e. TreeList) and others are quite average, such as Select. Check this competitor component : https://blueprintjs.com/docs/#select. Real world usages. Maybe you can achieve the very same thing with KendoReact, but even if true, I feel you don't understand what I need.

Too few UI framework care about layouts, KendoReact unfortunately is no exception. Layout is not just a box next to another. Layout is ordering content and filtering content depending on the device, it's putting some text over an image, it's making a row of three blocks and make sure they have the same height regardless of their content, it's having a page section that is exactly the size of the visitor's screen ; UIKit is very good at this ( https://getuikit.com/docs/height ). But it's also Special States : empty state ( https://material.io/design/communication/empty-states.html#content ) or result state ( https://ant.design/components/result/ )

My overall feeling is the product is disconnected from the environment and dev culture I'm working in.

1 comment

ADMIN

Carl

Posted on: 27 Jan 2020 17:10

Hi Jonathan,

By ways of introduction my name is Carl Bergenhem and I am the Product Manager for KendoReact.

First off, I appreciate you taking the time to put together this feedback. It certainly is well put and highlights some areas for improvement that we can focus on as we continue to iterate and improve the resources that accompany our components along with the UI components themselves.

Regarding the navigation, this is something that we are actively working on and you will be seeing improvements even in upcoming weeks as we work on overall performance improvements of our documentation website. It's an ongoing effort so we will continue to see what we can enhance beyond what we already have planned.

When it comes to naming convention there is some historical context for why components have a certain name. KendoReact is a part of the overall Kendo UI family (Angular, Vue, and jQuery UI libraries) which in itself is a part of a larger set of UI libraries spanning web and desktop (ASP.NET Ajax/MVC/Core, WinForms, WPF, etc.) which serves as historical context for how certain components are named. That being said, we know that there are alternative names that may have become more popular in certain libraries. As a part of this we will see how we can surface different names for components to make the library easier to navigate through depending on what naming convention you are used to.

The feedback around being able to see the structure (building blocks and even HTML of components I assume) and overall props for each component in a more digestible way is a great piece of feedback. We've already started discussing this internally and will think about how to best take what we have today and offer something in the vein of what you shared in terms of examples.

Finally, for the layout components this is something that we are actively developing components for as we speak. KendoReact, being built from the ground-up, has had to focus on many of our heavy hitting components (DataTable / Grid, TreeList, Scheduler, etc.). With our last release we have started to implement some of the more layout-specific components (Card, Avatar, etc.) and this is just our first step in to this area. While that of course does not help specifically today, it is a trend that has already started and you will see more of through 2020 and beyond. The examples you linked are great and give us an idea of components that are useful to you (and others) so we appreciate the direct references you provided.

There's a lot to digest in this particular thread, but it may be tricky to keep this open and have people vote on it. What I'm going to do is mark this as "complete" for historical context as I've responded, but can open up individual feedback items on your behalf that you can track if you desire. I would love to continue the conversation, but this portal may not be the best area to do so. If you have more feedback to provide, or just want to discuss this further, you can reach out to me at bergenhem@progress.com.

Regards,
Carl
Progress Telerik

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