[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 <mimi at osafoundation.org>
> Date: September 6, 2006 2:58:13 PM PDT
> To: John Anderson <john at osafoundation.org>
> Cc: Philippe Bossut <pbossut at osafoundation.org>, Sheila Mooney  
> <sheila at osafoundation.org>
> 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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