[Libreoffice-ux-advise] InfoBars: problem when stacking too many of those

[Mirek M.]

Hi Astron, Cedric, everyone,

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Stefan Knorr <heinzlesspam at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> the following is just an idea of mine (yes, the discussion is ~over, I
> know):
> In general, I agree with Mirek's stance of "don't overuse the info
> bars." Still, to cover some more possible cases:
> How about overlaying all infobars on top of each other, but push every
> subsequent infobar ~2 pixels down and make it a bit darker (or lighter).
> This way, you should easily be able to fit a few bars in the average
> window without it looking too ugly. If there are any more than three
> bars, you could show a counter, something like (4) or so.
> To see all bars, one could go either of two ways:
>
> * Create a hover effect where when the mouse hovers over the bars, they
> all automatically expand (might not be a good idea, given how we killed
> two hover features since two 3.6.0 already)


I would oppose this on the basis of ux-error-prevention. Moving targets are
rarely good.
Also, since the bars would expand anyway, it wouldn't really solve the
problem of having too many infobars in one window.

>
> * Let the user scroll through the info bars with the mouse wheel/touch
> scrolling
>

I would oppose this as well: not everyone can scroll. (I've seen various
touchpads where scrolling is pretty hard, and touchpad scrolling itself is
not very discoverable.)
Also, that the user should scroll would be undiscoverable itself.

>
> Additionally, we might indeed want to use colour to discriminate between
> different types of notifications. "Your document is unreadable" and
> "Printing ..." should definitely have different importances. Likewise,
> we could push more grave notifications above less grave ones.
>

Here I can only speak for my proposal, but infobars are not notifications
per se.
They're more like problem-solvers. They're there not to just inform you
that there's a problem, they're there to help you fix it, either by
offering a remedy right away (but, as the remedy has some side-effects, it
needs to ask the user first, as per ux-control) or at least by giving you
the necessary info to fix it.

Thus "Printing..." should never be an infobar, it should be shown in the
status bar or, preferably, handled by the OS itself.

There should be no "grave" and "non-grave" infobars. Each one should be
there in case of a problem. In case of a serious problem, where the user is
unable to work with the document or when editing would lead to data loss, a
modal dialog should be used instead.

Thus "Your document is unreadable" should not be an infobar either.

>
> Lastly, for notifications the user really needs to see, we could think
> about an elevation scheme when there are too many bars already, i.e. the
> normally non-modal alert would become a normal modal window. (Of course,
> this somewhat bears the question if there really should ever be a
> modeless notification that users have to answer.)
>

As said above: the infobar is for problems that don't prevent the user from
editing the document without data loss, yet for which an automated solution
could cause harm to the user, his data, or would counter what the user is
trying to do.
Infobars can be safely ignored or dismissed, but acting on them should
improve the UX.

Anyway, I stand by my previous post.
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