GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 736481
selection mode not suitable for Polari
Last modified: 2015-02-23 19:27:50 UTC
The selection mode pattern has been thought out as a solution for performing an action on a larger list of items. I think its use in Polari is quite inelegant: * There is quite a bit of travel required to reach the actionbar * There is only one action — 'leave' * 'leave' doesn't really apply well on people (private chats). Especially painful when that's usually the kind of item you want to get rid of from the sidebar I think Polari is better off using a context menu/popover instead, in a similar fashion we're doing it in Boxes where the selection mode was inappropriately used to perform actions on a non-running VM: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/boxes/wires/multi-window.png While having a single item in the popover isn't great either, it at least allows to have different action depending on context (leave vs close conversation).
I also tend to leave/close a single or maximum of two rooms/chats at a time, further hinting towards not using selection mode here.
I'm not wed to using the selection mode pattern - CC'ing Allan who proposed that pattern originally. However I'm not quite convinced that only exposing leave/close in a context menu is a great idea - before adapting the selection-mode patter, I had a [-] button in the sidebar header to go with [+]. Maybe we can go back to that, or maybe have a close button in each row that shows on hover?
(In reply to comment #0) > * 'leave' doesn't really apply well on people (private chats) Never left someone / been left by someone? Lucky man ...
The other option is to modify the channel-members popover to be a chat context headerbar menu (keeping the people counter instead of the hamburger for chatrooms). For direct messages it would only have one item "end conversation", for chatrooms it would have the userlist with searchbox as is, but have the "close chatroom" entry at the bottom.
There are two main questions here, in my mind: 1. How often do people use multiple selections here? 2. Is it ever right to enter selection mode with right click? My sense is (1) not often, and (2) probably not. So I think I agree with the bug.
(In reply to comment #5) > So I think I agree with the bug. Cool. Do you also agree with the proposed UI in comment #4?
(In reply to comment #6) > (In reply to comment #5) > > So I think I agree with the bug. > > Cool. Do you also agree with the proposed UI in comment #4? Users will expect to be able to interact with items in the sidebar list, so I think we need to make some changes there - the proposal in the original report seems like a good option for this. The proposal in comment #4 might be a good idea, but I think it's probably an additional step.
Created attachment 297706 [details] [review] roomList: Show a context popover on right-click Currently right-clicking a room will select the room and switch to selection mode. However as it is very uncommon to leave more than one room at once, so this behavior is far more cumbersome than helpful. So instead, just open a context popover that allows to directly leave the room in question.
Created attachment 297707 [details] [review] Drop selection mode In hindsight, the selection mode pattern was not a good choice for room management - it only exposes a single action and is hardly used for more than one item at once. In addition to this, the action uses quite unfortunate wording - "Leave husband" - when applied to private conversations (which are usually more volatile than rooms, thus more commonly closed). As the last commit made the leave action available without switching to selection mode, just drop the pattern entirely now.
Created attachment 297708 [details] [review] ui: Reduce room sidebar width After removing selection-mode, we no longer have to account for either selection-mode button or action bar, so we can cut down on the sidebar width to leave more room to actual content.
Attachment 297706 [details] pushed as 8917c47 - roomList: Show a context popover on right-click Attachment 297707 [details] pushed as 5b1432e - Drop selection mode Attachment 297708 [details] pushed as 79737e8 - ui: Reduce room sidebar width