Hello designers, We've been doing a lot of review and testing of the Layout Customizer component in preparation for the Fluid Infusion 0.3 release. One of the things we've been thinking about is the behaviour of drag and drop in this component.
A couple of months ago, Gary and Shaw-Han did a great job of putting together some detailed mockups. They're available at: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Portlet+Reorderer+Mockups If you notice, these mockups specify an approach that is very similar to myYahoo's news portal, available at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/. The noteworthy features of this approach are: * the use of a small drag "avatar" (the thing that follows your mouse during a drag operation) * a coloured, horizontal bar representing the drop target (the spot where the thing will land when you let go of the mouse) Another approach to drag and drop layouts is documented in the Fluid design pattern for Layout Preview: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Drag+and+Drop+-+Layout+Preview This approach is similar to iGoogle, http://www.google.com/ig. Noteworthy features include: * the use of a full-sized, transparent drag avatar that shows the whole portlet * a full-sized outlined box for the drop target * other portlets on the page shift out of the way to show a realistic preview of how the layout will look What's the best approach? I'm thinking this is one of those "it depends" questions. When portlets are similar in size and closely spaced, the myYahoo approach is probably simpler and easier to control. When portlets are more widely spaced and may have different sizes, a full preview of the layout seems more useful. At the time of the original designs, it's my understanding that we went with the myYahoo-style interaction because it was immediately similar to some existing code we have in the Reorderer. On the other hand, the Reorderer is highly customizable. The dev team tells me that implementing both behaviours should be relatively straightforward. It may impact our release date a bit, but should we consider taking the time to provide an option that will allow for the iGoogle-style of preview? I'd really appreciate opinions and advice from designers in the community. Colin --- Colin Clark Technical Lead, Fluid Project Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto http://fluidproject.org _______________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list [email protected] http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
