On Jul 10, 2006, at 2:56 PM, J E wrote:
There are two things I've seen regarding lists in sidebars that are
relevant here
1) users tend to build hierarchy with naming when no hierarchy exists
Yes, very true.
Ultimately, the sidebar is not the right affordance for displaying
and interacting with organizational structures. The user's full
organizational structure also probably doesn't need to be on display
at all times.
Much of the design research we've done has been in the realm of
understanding how people use their sidebars, why they build
hierarchies, when they are used and when they get in the way. It was
clear that the sidebar was being used in 3 ways:
1. As a way to organize information (via hierarchies);
2. As a way to access frequently used folders (shortcuts bar);
3. As a way to tag items to narrow down search and/or to compensate
for non-existent, slow or crappy search.
This led to countless problems where users ended up with sidebars
that were poorly organized and too cluttered to function well as a
shortcuts bar.
Furthermore, users were constantly in a conflicted state: One minute,
trying to open up the hierarchy and widen the sidebar to see more of
their organizational structure, the next minute, closing down the
hierarchy and narrowing the sidebar in order to see the details of
their data in the summary and detail panes.
In other words, with traditional sidebar hierarchies, the way in
which users can zoom in / zoom out of their data is clunky and not
designed well wrt user workflows.
In the long-run, we will want to provide a fully-developed UI for
organizing information. For now, the sidebar is really a shortcuts bar.
However, I'm aware that the lack of a fully developed UI for
organizing information will spur some people to try and use the
sidebar as an organizational tool.
2) the names of items will always exceed available space
That is a wordy way of saying tooltips are a very good idea, but
adjustable sidebars may not help as much.
Agreed, tooltips are not the ultimate solution. But neither is the
adjustable sidebar. :o)
Keep in mind, I'm coming from a background in HCI work for
enterprise software, where large lists and trees in sidebars are
very common. This may be far less true for consumer software.
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