[Design] focus in the sidebar

[Mimi Yin]

I'm moving another bugzilla discussion to the list.

We're trying to work through whether or not to make an exception in  
the sidebar for mouse and keyboard focus behavior. Generally speaking  
keyboard focus moves in tandem with mouse focus. Traditionally, if  
you use your mouse to select an item in a window, keyboard focus  
moves to that window and you can do things like delete and/or use the  
arrow keys to navigate up and down.

The question we're grappling with today is: Is this model appropriate  
for UIs with sidebar navigation where users are not necessarily  
trying to "shift focus to the sidebar" when they click in the  
sidebar, but instead they are simply trying to "change the focus in  
their summary pane" and clicking in the sidebar is merely the lever  
they have to adjust to accomplish that.

On the one hand, you can argue that most of the time, most of the  
people remain "focused" on the summary pane, even when clicking in  
the sidebar. On the other hand, an exception to a well-worn rule can  
be confusing.

Email clients like Thunderbird follow the "shift focus in tandem"  
model, while Apple Mail makes it a little harder to shift focus to  
the sidebar and most users probably never figure out how.

Has anyone used both clients and noticed the difference? If you have  
any personal anecdotes, please share.

https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2127

------- Additional Comment #9 From Mimi Yin 2006-01-04 18:59 PST  
[reply] -------
Changing name of bug so I can understand what it means ;o)

So I think this has broader design implications than just sticking in  
a detail
view, which should be easy enough (design-wise)...it brings up the  
whole "focus"
in the sidebar issue.

Basically I feel that if we're going to have a detail view for  
collections, then
we need to prevent the focus from automatically shifting to the  
sidebar when you
click in the sidebar. Otherwise, there will be no correlation between  
which pane
has focus (sidebar versus summary) and what's displayed in the detail  
view
(collection dv or item dv).

We can have a special action for shifting focus to the sidebar and  
bringing up
the collection dv (ie. clicking on either the sharing status icon or an
"information" icon if the collection isn't shared) And we can also  
support this
from the menus/context menus.

------- Additional Comment #10 From Philippe Bossut 2006-01-04 21:51  
PST [reply] -------
I don't understand Mimi's point:
"Basically I feel that if we're going to have a detail view for  
collections, then we need to prevent the
focus from automatically shifting to the sidebar when you click in  
the sidebar."
Why? If the focus is on the sidebar when clicking on it, displaying a  
detail view for the selected
collection just makes sense...

"Otherwise, there will be no correlation between which pane has focus  
(sidebar versus summary) and
what's displayed in the detail view (collection dv or item dv)."
? There will be a correlation: the selected item (collection or item)  
in the focused view (sidebar or
summary) is displayed in the dv...

Without going far, iCal has a simple unambiguous way of doing this.  
Why not mimic it?
I agree that displaying collection info in the dv requires the focus  
area issue to be dealt with but I don't
understand your point at all. What is wrong in having the focus moved  
to the sidebar?

Note: may be this discussion should move to the Design list (under  
the "no discussion in Bugzilla" rule
from Fogel's poss...)

------- Additional Comment #11 From Mimi Yin 2006-01-05 04:10 PST  
[reply] -------
I think you can get away with such a proposal in a caledaring app.  
However, I
think users expect to have the detail view of the selected item  
persist when
switching between collections in the sidebar. (ie. when copying and  
pasting
between two emails, etc) The detail view of the collection is   
generally not a
very useful thing to look at?

Also, not having the focus automatically move to the sidebar makes  
sense from a
workflow perspective as well. Users are much more likely to want to  
use the
arrow keys to browse individual items than to use the arrow keys to  
browse their
collections.

It's more a question of leveling features wrt usage. I'm not saying  
we shouldn't
have any mechanism for shifting the focus (ie. using the tab key), I  
just think
it should be a little harder to get at because browsing the sidebar  
with your
arrow keys and looking at the collection dv are going to be far less  
common.

I'll move this to the design list after csg.
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