Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 344876

Summary:

[client] page level commands on right are too far away from the action

Product:

[ECD] Orion

Reporter:

Susan McCourt <susan>

Component:

Client

Assignee:

Susan McCourt <susan>

Status:

RESOLVED FIXED

QA Contact:

Severity:

normal

Priority:

CC:

bokowski, eclipse.felipe, john.arthorne, malgorzata.tomczyk, Mike_Wilson, Silenio_Quarti, simon_kaegi, susan, Szymon.Brandys

Version:

0.2

Target Milestone:

0.2

Hardware:

OS:

Windows 7

Whiteboard:

Attachments:

Description	Flags
screenshot	none
nav snapshot	none
editor screenshot	none

Description Susan McCourt

2011-05-05 13:51:56 EDT

I think this problem is most noticeable in the navigator and navigator-like pages.  

We have actions in the actions column that operate against the items shown in the list.  If you want to perform a similar action (such as create a new folder) on the root of the page, you have to go all the way to the right to find the action.

This is a usability annoyance because it forces you to change where you are looking.  It's also a conceptual design problem because the thing describing where you are operating (the page title breadcrumb) is across the page from the actions that apply against it.

Comment 1 Susan McCourt

2011-05-05 15:05:06 EDT

Created attachment 194866 [details]
screenshot

this screenshot shows my orion as hacked in my workspace.  It experiments with two concepts:

- move page commands to the left (the progress UI would then appear on the right).  This seems conceptually more correct. 
- see what it looks like if we stop using icons and use text only.

For the git clone case, it definitely makes the clone command easier to find (though I think we'd want to shorten the command label to "Clone...").

Comment 2 Susan McCourt

2011-05-05 15:11:00 EDT

Created attachment 194869 [details]
nav snapshot

here's the same idea in the navigator.  When the left pane is collapsed, it looks pretty nice.  When the left pane is open, you could argue that the commands should be aligned with the splitter instead of the breadcrumb/page title.  (but that wasn't easy to hack up in 5 min)

Comment 3 Susan McCourt

2011-05-05 15:14:32 EDT

Created attachment 194872 [details]
editor screenshot

Here it doesn't bother me so much that the commands aren't aligned with the splitter.  Probably because the content on the left (outliner) is more closely related to the page and so the actions apply to both.

As a side note, the links help show that the undo/redo links (and buttons) aren't important enough to belong in the toolbar.  I've been meaning to pull them out, I originally put them there just to test some command framework layout.

Comment 4 Susan McCourt

2011-05-05 15:15:58 EDT

opinions?
I plan to work with Linda on this idea to polish it a bit, for example the white text is a bit bright and the links need link emphasis.

But I think that both ideas (using links on the toolbar and moving the actions over) are promising.

Comment 5 Susan McCourt

2011-05-05 16:13:06 EDT

I thought this played a lot better.  Linda had some visual tweaks, including a separator to help align the commands with the breadcrumb.  These details will continue to improve as we do visual polish during M8.

I was antsy to get reactions to this, so I showed some screencaps to McQ and he agreed this was an improvement.

releasing.

Comment 6 Malgorzata Janczarska

2011-05-06 09:21:46 EDT

I like the new idea but I see one think we could do better. If there are no actions (for instance the welcome page) we display only the separator. It looks a little strange, I think it would be much better if we displayed the leading separator only if we really have any actions.

Comment 7 Susan McCourt

2011-05-09 11:36:23 EDT

(In reply to comment #6)
> I like the new idea but I see one think we could do better. If there are no
> actions (for instance the welcome page) we display only the separator. It looks
> a little strange, I think it would be much better if we displayed the leading
> separator only if we really have any actions.

agree.  The separator design visuals are going to change somewhat so I'm not going to make this change immediately, though.