GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 722612
App folders UX review
Last modified: 2014-01-23 09:40:08 UTC
The following is a quick review of the new app folders UI. Since the original design, I've worked a fair bit on a set of common design patterns for collections [1]. What I'm proposing here is informed by that. * The action bar at the bottom of the screen is missing a top stroke (this could be fixed by using the new action bar widget, perhaps). * I agreed with Jon that it would be better to organise collections through add/remove/move actions rather than treating them like properties. Therefore, if possible, it would be good to have three possible actions (the buttons for these should be left-aligned in the action bar): - "Add to Folder..." - displayed if the selection contains any apps that aren't in a folder. - "Move to Folder..." - displayed if the selection only contains apps that already belong to a folder. - "Remove from Folder" - displayed if the selection contains any apps that are in folders. Folders window [2]: * Confirmation button should read "Add", not "Done". * Add button should be insensitive until a row is selected. * The radios seem a bit awkward and inconsistent with what we do elsewhere. Placing a check mark icon after the label seems like a better approach. * The current method of creating a folder needs a button to say "add the folder", and also preferably a way to cancel the process of creating the folder. One way to do this would be through a popover [3]. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/Collections [2] https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/software/version2/software-installed-app-folders.png [3] https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/software/version2/software-installed-app-folders-add-folder.png
Wow, a huge improvement so fast! Some small things I noticed testing this: * In the add to folder dialog, the add button should be blue. * After completing an action using selection mode, selection mode should close (eg. after adding an app to a folder, the dialog should close and selection mode exit). * The rows in the installed view can change height when folders are added/removed. One solution might be to force a minimum height on them?
Except for row height, should be all fixed.
How do you remove empty folders, and how do you remove folders with items?
You don't remove the folder, per se - you can move all apps out of it, at which point gnome-shell should be smart enough to not show it. I noticed that we currently have no way to get the names of such empty folders out of the list shown in gnome-software. We could just clean them up if the go empty, but that might be unexpected. Allan ?
(In reply to comment #3) > How do you remove empty folders, and how do you remove folders with items? Very good question! We have two options here: 1. Users have to explicitly add and remove the folders from Software. 2. We automatically remove the folders when they're empty. I went for option 2 when I did the designs, simply because I wanted the design to be simple and straight forward, and because I didn't see people being very interested in having empty folders sitting around.