In D365, the left-side list on many pages there are a navigation list, like in the All discounts page in Dynamics 365 Commerce looks clean, but it is poor UX for real discount maintenance.
This is not a proper working list. It is a record selector pretending to be a list page.
Discount administration is not about opening one record at a time. Users need to search, filter, compare, multi-select, validate, publish, expire, and correct discounts. The current design makes that harder.
The list only shows a few fields: discount ID, name and type. But the important operational fields are hidden: publish status, validation status, start/end date, currency, price groups, best price, and pricing priority.
That means users cannot quickly answer basic questions:
Which discounts are not validated?
Which are published?
Which expire soon?
Which have wrong price groups?
Which have suspicious values?
A proper grid would expose exceptions immediately. This design hides them and forces users into slow, record-by-record inspection.
This also matters more now because AI, Copilot, and MCP-based agents increasingly reason over forms, entities, and user-facing application structure. If the form design hides the operational dataset behind a single-record selector, we are not only reducing human productivity; we are also making the application context weaker for automation and AI-assisted work.
D365 already has strong grid capabilities: filtering, sorting, personalization, saved views, export, and multi-select. This page and other forms chooses not to use them where they matter.
Microsoft should update the form design guidelines and refresh these form patterns. Good form design must support how users actually work: search, compare, filter, select, act — and increasingly, let AI understand the operational context.
The problem is that users are not hired to admire tidy forms — they are hired to get work done. Please ban these navigation lists. We don’t like them. Use propper grids.
Here is an example of how it should be (AI generated):
AI generated a nice AX 2009 form 🙂
Yea😂. Nostalgia. But it worked. I just hope not all go into hibernation because something happens on AI. I have learned one thing; it is more profitable to do something than to wait for the future to settle.
The inventory counting form is another example for this type of annoying UX.
Hi Kurt – You are absolutely SO right. Plus it’s difficult to make a simpel cut+paste eksport to excel, and make multiple record changes.
I hate these forms.
Thanks – Martin