Re: People widgets plans

["Marco Pesenti Gritti" <mpgritti gmail com>]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 8:28 PM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya
<marinaz redhat com> wrote:
> Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>>
>>  * Clicking on both the text and the icon open a chat. Hovering for a
>> bit displays the details dialog. (same behavior as gmail)

Thanks, a bunch of interesting points here...

> Hovering to bring up the details dialog seems inconsistent with the rest of
> the bigboard. We usually just show some tooltip when you hover over
> something. Also, currently, if you hover over the currently played music
> information which can be a part of the person item view, it brings up the
> music details. On the other hand, right click in the Files stock shows the
> slideout.  Maybe we can do the same in the people stock.

I agree with Owen that right click is not discoverable enough.

> Though I too find it confusing that clicking on some sections of the person
> item brings up the chat, and clicking on other sections brings up the
> details slideout, I am not sure that using the left click on any part of the
> person item should be dedicated to opening the chat. I find that I want to
> lookup some details (such as an e-mail or an external account) about the
> person at least as often as I want to open a chat dialog. Maybe we can just
> have an explicit "Chat" link next to a presence icon.

I think we should try to simplify the item view and to push actions
out to details dialog. The space on the bigboard is limited and the
repetition of the same action link for each of the items is visually
distracting.

What about making left click mean "talk with"? It would start a chat
when possible and fallback to email. It's a good default because it
should apply to almost all the items displayed, it's the most direct
action and it's something that people will want to do very often.

> Sorting people displayed based on how much you actually chat with them
> should help make the people stock more chat-oriented. However, it is worth
> remembering that there can be a long tail of people who don't have IM
> accounts (particularly, in the Mugshot contacts case) or are not online.
> Dedicating a left click to opening a chat window in these cases would be a
> huge waste of a left click option :).

If the default action is "talk with" then we could include email in
the sorting criteria. There might be cases where you want to have
someone always visible that you don't talk with often, but that's fine
because you can still put those at the top manually.

> It is also good to keep in mind that there is a people browser view that you
> get when you click More on the people stock, and develop these views in
> parallel. Left-clicking on the items there currently shows the person's
> details in the view on the left.

I don't think we need consistency there, they are different kind of UI
objects (proof in the fact that right click is more discoverable in
the browser than in the widget).

> One other things that I would like to see from the people stock redesign, is
> making it easier to select person's e-mail. Right now, when I see someone's
> email in the details slideout, I can click on it, and it opens a compose
> message window in Thunderbird (my default mail application). From there, I
> can copy and paste the e-mail to a webmail account, if I wish to use that.
> However, there is no way to select an e-mail directly from the details view
> to paste it to the webmail account. Further, if I didn't have any local mail
> application set up, I wouldn't be able to copy the address at all. It would
> be useful to have a "Copy Email Address" option on the left click.

Sounds like a good candidate for the details dialog...

> Also, I noticed that the default action for the people search results right
> now is to open a Mugshot page. This needs to change, since IM contacts or
> people who have not accepted a Mugshot invitation do not have a Mugshot
> page. I think we should open a people browser with the person item selected
> and the details showing in all cases.

Do we have a mail address in this case?

In the case we don't have a mail, nor an im contact, I think left
click could just show the details dialog.

Marco