[Design] [Sum] Sidebar collection overlay icon interaction issues

[Mimi Yin]

I'm forwarding/ summarizing a private thread re: the behavior of the collection overlay icons to the list. We hope to address these issues at tomorrow's Sidebar design-apps meeting to nail down a final design for Beta. 1. According to the Sidebar Spec: http://svn.osafoundation.org/docs/trunk/docs/specs/rel0_7/Sidebar-0.7.html, the collection overlay icons for overlayed collections should de-activated when users select an OOTB collection (in order to show that overlayed collections will turn be temporarily turned off when the user selects an OOTB collection). I tweaked this design a bit and asked John to try de-activating all the collection icons for both overlayed and non-overlayed collections. We're not sure if this is better or worse than just de-activating the icons for overlayed collections. On the one hand, it might feel really jarring. OTOH, if we don't provide visual feedback for non-overlayed collections when users move to the OOTB area of the sidebar, users might be confused as to why the rollover effect to overlay collections sometimes works and sometimes doesn't work. For now, we're going to try deactivating all of the collection icons and see how that feels. On a separate thread: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-September/005366.html, I've also suggested that we deactivate all user-defined collection icons when users click out of the Calendar App Area, to show that overlays don't work outside of the Calendar. Overlayed and non-Overlayed state would be preserved across App areas, but the whole icon would become deactivated. 2. The interaction behavior for the sidebar collection overlay icons, as implemented in 0.6, is different from the other click-in-place widgets in the app. It is also different from the way click-in-place widgets (e.g. checkboxes, radio buttons) work in Mac OS and XP.  Currently, the Mousedown state for non-overlayed collections looks the same as the Overlayed state for Overlayed collections. This is consistent with how checkboxes used to work on Windows. It would be nice if we could align this behavior with the other click-in-place widgets we have in the app (e.g. Mark-up bar stamping buttons, Dashboard click-in-place widgets, etc). This means that the Mousedown state should be simply a darkened version of the Mouseover state. And the checked or overlayed state should not appear until the user Mouses-up. See below for more details. Begin forwarded message: From: Mimi Yin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: September 6, 2006 2:58:13 PM PDT To: John Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: Philippe Bossut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Sheila Mooney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: deactive icons Hi John, I played around with the stuff you checked in and I think a big reason why the switch feels really jarring is because the new sidebar collection icons aren't in place yet for all the states. I think once these are in, the visual feedback should be very slight. Just enough to let you know that something has changed, but not so jarring as to feel like a bug. In other news, I think we need to make the click interaction in the sidebar consistent with the other state widgets in the UI. The stamping buttons in the mark up bar and in the Dashboard all have separate icons to represent Mousedown state versus Stamped (or in the case of the Sidebar, Overlayed) state. That means the Mousedown state for un-Overlayed collections needs to look different from the collection icon for Overlayed collections. Mousing down on an Overlayed collection icon needs to look different from the collection icon for an un-Overlayed collection. I also just noticed that when you mousedown on an un-overlayed collection icon, you actually get the mouseover state of an overlayed collection. Similarly, when you mousedown on an overlayed collection, you get the mouseover state of an un-Overlayed collection. I'm guessing that this is because when you Mousedown, you're also technically mousing over the collection icon. But I think this isn't the behavior that we want. So the proposal is to have 8 distinct states: From left to right: SidebarIcon SidebarIconDeactive SidebarIconMouseover SidebarIconMousedown SidebarIconOverlayed SidebarIconOverlayedDeactive SidebarIconOverlayedMouseover SidebarIconOverlayedMousedown I've checked these in. Mimi On Sep 6, 2006, at 12:54 PM, John Anderson wrote: Hi Mimi: I renamed your icons to match the conventions in the code. They are now: SidebarIconDeactive.png SidebarIconMouseDownDeactive.png I also checked in the code that uses them. Currently I'm colorizing the icons. If you want the colors to match the other icons you should change them to be the same color as SidebarIcon.png. I think I have a slight preference toward making SidebarIconDeactive the same as SidebarIcon and making the SidebarIconMouseDownDeactive the same as SidebarIcon or maybe a slight variation on SidebarIconMouseDown. This is because I find changing all the icons jarring and we've got so many different small icons that their meaning is unclear from the image. Anyway, give it a try out and let me know what you think. I can try other options if you like and we can also get more opinions if you think that might help. John

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