24 Mar
2011
24 Mar
'11
3:47 a.m.
On 03/22/2011 05:26 PM, Luca Anca wrote:
Hi all,
I've got some suggestions that the current way of editing the dashboard
is not really intuitive (Edit -> Inline Form), and mainly because users
wouldn't necessarily look under "Edit" for a method to change the
dashboard. Also, other users that I've observed, forgot that they need
to go in some edit mode before changing things.
I also agree that without documentation no user would figure out that
editing a dashboard is under Edit -> Inline Form. While editing will
still remain "in inline mode", from the technical pov, we need to
provide a easier way for users to discover this.
Let's look at the following options:
One important thing to keep in mind is that most users don't have a
submenu under Edit, just the one top menu entry.
1/ Add a "Customize" menu entry under edit,
in the page menu, as
proposed in the mockups from Cati, a long time ago:
http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/GadgetsDashboard .
Doesn't work for simple users.
2/ Add a "Customize this dashboard" button
in the dashboard in view
mode, in the top right corner, something like
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Design/GadgetIntegration/oldDashboa…
but styled better to integrate with the current dashboard.
Best thing from a discoverability PoV, but stands in the way of a clean UI.
3/ Define and implement a mechanism to allow the
inline form edit to be
triggered for a document without that document having to include a
document which has an object in it. E.g. as Vincent proposed at one
point, trigger inline mode when an object is present in the current
document.
I should note that solutions 1 and 3 still assume that the user will go
to "Edit" to try to customize the dashboard, which can also be
problematic (I cannot figure it out for sure right now, we need fresh
users or proper UX expertise which I don't have).
Well, everything in XWiki should be editable this way. Users should
learn this. Eventually they will look for an "Edit" link or button, and
they will click on it.
How does this fit with the idea that every user should have his own
dashboard?
The main homepage is problematic since it includes a dashboard defined
somewhere else. It's wrong, IMO, to even offer to edit a dashboard
that's somewhere else in the context of another document, using the edit
mode of that document. It's like allowing to edit the {{include}}d
documents.
In conclusion, it depends on what is going to be edited. If the
dashboard is supposed to be defined in the current document, then it
should be edited inline using the normal edit button.
If it's required to be able to edit dashboards that are just living
inside a document, while their data resides someplace else, then the
inline edit mode is completely wrong. It will mess with the rest of the
page. In this case, a button inside the dashboard UI itself is best.
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu/