The Gallery and shapes, following the UX/design meeting 2023-Nov-30

[Eyal Rozenberg]

In this week's design meeting, bug 158253 came up:

Shapes-via-Gallery is problematic & partially redundant with the Shapes
sub-toolbars and sidebar
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158253

I was not available to attend (it was during my work hours); but since
this is not really about a bug, and since I believe the meeting saw
anything but a serious discussion of this matter, I thought I'd reply to
the list. I'll try to address some points regarding the issue of "Basic
Shapes" vs "Gallery", and problems with what the Gallery has. I think
this is relevant enough to bring this up on our mailing list even, since
it's not about a specific bug but a large(ish) feature in our UI.

So, A clip-art or media item gallery is certainly a useful thing to
have. I'm not entirely sure it's important to have one built-in to the
office app UI, but let's say we take that as a given.

However - we should look at what our gallery actually contains: It's not
just poor categorization. Just look at what's in there, and ask yourself
if this is what we want to show users... but let me expand on that with
a few examples:


'curved-left-arrow', 'curved-right-arrow' etc.
--------------------------------------------------------

These four items in the Arrows category are all the exact same shape,
but rotated in 4 directions and each with different coloring. We see
this phenomenon a lot across the gallery: Artificially inflating the
number of shapes with faux variety, which serves to obscures what the
gallery actually offers.

This shape is a sort of a  "flattened-3D-stripe" kind of arrow, making a
U-turn or 180-degree turn. There's a non-3D shape making a U-turn (item
3 in the arrow category) - with more flexible controls than the
3D-stripe shapes, i.e. you give up flexibility for a 3D-effect. This
feels like a weird choice to need to make.

What's entirely missing, though, are shapes other than a U-turn arrow
with a similar 3D effect. Even, say, a 90-degree circular-arc stripe
rather 180 degrees, or a more straight-angle turn. Or more decorative
gallery items which complement the use of this effect.

More importantly, though, is the fact that these shapes are not
finalized media one puts into a gallery for display: They are
building-blocks for drawing diagrams. In a media gallery, I would not
expect to even have control points. So, if you look at the 'oval-arrow'
shape, or the shape named 'top-arrows' - they have no control points; it
might be a lot of fun if we could pull and tug and scale different
aspects of it, but - we can't; it's a finalized, albeit vectorized,
piece of clipart. We can take it apart and play with its sub-components,
but it's not in itself intended as a flexible component.

'right-arrow', 'left-arrow', 'down-arrow', 'up-arrow'
----------------------------------------------

This is another example of four shapes, which are really just one shape
with fake variety. For simple arrows, the gallery offers a one-sided and
a two-sided arrow, and that's it. But this quadruplet of duplicates is
an important example for another reason: It's a shape that's already
part of "Basic Shapes", in the "Block Arrows" category. So, all four
shapes are just duplicates of another shape, which we already have
available in a more accessible way.

... except that the situation is actually worse than that. If you'll
compare the gallery block-arrow and the "Block Arrows" block-arrow from
the toolbar, you'll notice that the latter has a single control point,
for the arrow shaft width; but the former has both that control point,
and the one for arrowhead length.

So not only do we have internal redundancy within the gallery; and not
only is there redundancy between the gallery and the Basic Shapes; but
"Basic Shapes" has been neglected in this respect, with a better version
of a shape having been placed in the gallery instead of where it belongs.


Shapes: 'textbox', 'header', 'title'
----------------------------------------------
These shapes are just textboxes, each with a string of text, and at a
different font size. Supposedly, they stand for plain textbox, textbox
that corresponds to your presentation's header text font, and textbox
that corresponds to your presentation title font. In actuality, they're
nothing of the kind: It's just Liberation Sans in three specific sizes.
If you change the presentation styles or use a template - these shapes
won't adapt; and their names will just be misleading.

This is another example of a set of shapes which have artificial
variation; but they are also three shapes that will never be used,
except perhaps by mistake; and of shapes which, I argue, no user would
consider placing in their clipart or media gallery, because of their
complete triviality. It is as though the Gallery populators decided to
pack some shapes for us, in case we got stranded on a deserted island
where the toolbars and menus don't work, and we can only use the gallery
to insert anything.... these three are at the same time silly and
garish. It also doesn't help that their preview shows nothing but text
on a white background, i.e. it's not even clear that they're textboxes
unless you read their names.

--

These are not the only examples of these issues - there's more where
that came from. The gallery is very much a neglected feature: Its UI
behavior and its contents. This, in contrast to the Basic Shapes -
toolbar panel-buttons and a sidebar deck. Those have very informative
icons; there is no redundancy; and the shapes are stripped of extra
styling, like color variations etc. _That_ mechanism is in wide use (I
strongly believe; I have no statistics about any of this).

I have a strong suspicion that it is rarely used in practice. But there
is some small use in having the Gallery as it is today: A rhetorical
device against improving Basic Shapes... "If you want that shape, just
put it in the Gallery".


Eyal


On 30/11/2023 16:25, Heiko Tietze wrote:
>   * Shapes-via-Gallery is problematic & partially redundant with
>     the Shapes sub-toolbars and sidebar
>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158253
>     + no point in changing the Gallery (Stuart)
>     + the Gallery is a place for various content being sorted currently
>       by tasks mostly; if we remove the line drawings, for example, it
> might
>       become more polished but we loose functionality; nevertheless
>       some items might be worth to challenge (Heiko)
>     + categorization is in fact not perfect but providing improvements to
>       the Gallery is beyond one ticket (Hossein)
>     + not a fan of removing content rather better categorization (Hossein)
>     => ticket not actionable => WF