Alan,
Surprisingly, there is still no standard pattern or even a frequently
used convention for indicating what can be dragged. (Or there is one
but you and I have never heard of it, which means it isn't a very
successful standard.)
Still, some things can sometimes be dragged, e.g., an icon, a member
of a thing-bar (whether or not the things are icons), an object within
a drawing or layout, a border line, selected text, a selected group of
things, or a drag-handle and whatever the handle drags. Experienced
users probably consider the possibility that such things can be
dragged. You might be able to take advantage of that suspicion. For
example, while the pointer is hovering over a table row, or (to be
less disruptive) when a row is selected, surround it by a drop shadow
that makes it appear to float, or display a drag handle alongside it.
Either cue may tempt the user to try dragging the row or its handle,
as the case may be. Or, if row-dragging can only happen in an edit
mode (I hate modes but when a document is shared, especially on the
web, an edit mode can reduce the incidence of inadvertent corruption),
display a drag handle to the left of each row whenever it is in edit
mode.
Larry Tesler
On Dec 1, 2008, at 7:59 PM, Alan Wexelblat wrote:
I have a screen with a slightly unusual UI. There is a table of rows
that can be edited in place, but you can also drag and drop the rows,
somewhat in the style of Excel. You can also drag the rows onto
targets adjacent to the grid.
The question is - how do I give people reasonable visual cues that
drag-and-drop are acceptable actions here?
Given that there are a large number of drop targets, I can't think of
a good design pattern other than drag-drop for this but I'm open to
suggestions on that as well.
Any thoughts?
--Alan
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