Hello,
I have actually filed this as a bug Fluid-1335 (http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-1335
).
It would be interesting to see which implementation users prefer.
Thanks
Justin
On 9-Sep-08, at 2:55 PM, Paul Zablosky wrote:
Thank you Gary. One of the problems with this issue, is that we
don't really have a way to do comparison testing with users. Now
that we're discussing this in the open fluid-work list, I can put a
question directly to the developers:
Would it be possible to create a version of the reorderer that sets
the position of the drop target not with reference to the pointer
position, but with reference to the centre of gravity of the
avatar? Since the avatar and pointer are locked together during the
drag, this would seem to me to be a simple fixed translation of
coordinates, but I don't know enough about the implementation
details to guess if it's easy or difficult. Anyway, if we had such
a thing, we could easily do user testing to find out which they
preferred:
targets that move with the pointer
targets that move with the centre of the avatar
I'm suggesting using the centre as tracking point, simply because
it's the most obvious alternative to following the cursor position.
There may be other loci that could be considered.
I'll respond to Gary's responses within his message below.
Paul
Gary Thompson wrote:
Paul,
I'm cc'ing fluid-work so everyone can appreciate the questions and
digest the responses.
Great questions. The goal is to create an intuitive, elegant
design, so questioning the behavior is warranted if it seems to not
match your expectations.
As Colin mentioned, the Reorder - and thus the Layout Customizer -
are currently moving targets. The target movement was initiated
from the user testing done on the first integration environment,
which reported unusable response and behavior. Refer to the user
testing results:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/2Ys7
Three comments:
1. Context is king.
How drag and drop behaves will be specific to context. The
examples on the Layout Customizer springboard: http://build.fluidproject.org/fluid/fluid-components/html/LayoutCustomizer.html
...actually represent something closer to list reordering, which by
context will have a different behavior. What most currently
represents the Layout Customizer, is the uPortal integration here:
http://build.fluidproject.org/uPortal/render.userLayoutRootNode.uP
I totally agree that context is king. That's why I tried out all
the different examples of the reorderer on the demos page. I found
that I had the same difficulty with all of them, which led me to
think that the problem was below the application level.
2. The grab handle can be defined.
And is defined to be just the portlet title bar in the Layout
Customizer integration in uPortal (rather than the whole portlet).
This should help alleviate the confusion of location of the drag
avatar to cursor, though we may find in further testing that that
is still an issue.
Yes, I noticed this. It's harder to demonstrate with the Layout
Customizer because the grab area is smaller. But you can show the
effect by grabbing at the left or right end of the grab area. The
behaviour of the drop indicator is more consistent with a limited
grab area, but it still feels strange if the grab area is at the
edge of the element I'm grabbing.
This of course gives us another thing to test. Do users prefer to
have a large area where they can grab an element, or should it be
limited to a specific "grab me here" region?
3. The drag avatar may need to be minimized in uPortal.
The size of a portlet in uPortal is highly variable, and user
testing has already uncovered the unwieldiness of large portlets
being dragged in a preview mode. It may turn out that for uPortal,
we revert to an earlier design that more closely resembled the
Yahoo behavior at the time - a small grey box as the drag avatar,
and a non-preview, colored line as the drop indicator.
A smaller avatar might help, but I still think it skirts the issue
of where the drop indicator appears.
Gary
Paul Zablosky wrote:
I have been playing with the reorderer examples on the daily build
page <http://build.fluidproject.org/> and getting a feel for the
behaviour of the avatars and the targets. The behaviour is not
quite what I expect as I move things around, and I'm wondering
whether I'm taking an idiosyncratic view of things. The problem
is that the drop target doesn't seem to appear where I expect it
to. I position the avatar squarely over where I want to move the
element, and yet the target is one position off to the left or
right (or above or below). I have to move the avatar farther
than (I feel) should be necessary to get the target to appear
where I want it. It makes the whole interaction sort of weirdly
sticky for me. What it comes down to is that I feel I should be
able to predict where the target appears, and I can't. At first I
thought that this was just a performance issue, but now I know
what causes it.
Here's the explanation. What I'm trying to do is position the
avatar where I want to drop the element, but the target isn't
following the avatar. The target follows the /pointer/. So with
a fairly large avatar -- such as a portlet window, or a multi-
line list element, it makes a huge difference where I grab the
element. If I grab the top edge of the list element, the target
will appear in relation to the top edge of the avatar. If I grab
the bottom edge, the target follows the position of the bottom.
But I never pay attention to where I grab the thing. My eyes are
tracking the outline of the avatar, and I sort of expect the
target to appear where I have the avatar centred -- and that's not
happening.
So it raises the question in my mind. Is it just me, or do others
have the same experience of the movements of the screen objects
not quite following their expectations?
Of course my experience means nothing. I know that we can only
settle an issue like this with user testing. So here's the real
question: Do users have the idea that they are influencing the
position of the drop target by the location of the avatar, or do
they have the feeling they are shoving it around with the pointer,
while ignoring the outlines of the avatar? And do we have any
user testing results or research data (possibly from some outside
source) that can tell us this?
I spent a little time this afternoon trying to train myself to be
a better drag-and-dropper, using the four reorderer examples <http://build.fluidproject.org/
> -- either centring the pointer carefully on the element I'm
grabbing, or following the pointer image rather than the avatar
outline. I'm learning, but it doesn't feel quite natural.
Comments? Am I marching to a completely off-the-beat drummer here?
Regards to all,
Paul
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