Re: [Usability] Looking for advice - UI pattern - editable, reorderable lists

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 2 Apr 2008, at 03:51, Toms wrote:
> The problem is that reordering with drag'n'drop becomes extremely  
> difficult when editing is turned on (standart GTK editable column  
> that sets to edit mode on the click after selecting - similar to  
> what you can see in evolutions todo list).

Personally, I'd consider this a bug (or at least, an area for  
improvement) in the widget itself.  I'm not sure why it infers that  
you want to go into editing mode on the mouse down event of the second  
click, when it should really be on the mouse up event, giving you time  
to start a drag before editing mode kicks in.

Arguably, the second click should perhaps also have to occur within  
the vicinity of the existing text for it to be considered a 'start  
editing' gesture, leaving the behaviour of clicks/drags on the  
whitesepace on the rest of the row unaffected.  But that would make  
getting into editing mode tricky if the existing text is very short  
(or, worst case scenario, a single space).

Another option would of course be to ditch the widget's editing mode,  
and add an explicit 'edit' button.  If editing (rather than creating)  
is a relatively infrequent operation, that probably wouldn't be too  
painful for your users.

(Aside: it does look a little odd that you have "add" and "remove"  
buttons at the bottom of one column, and "+" and "-" buttons at the  
top of the other...)

> b) Create new column that would be intended for dragging, change  
> mouse cursor on hover accordingly

This is pretty much the first workaround that sprung to my mind-- add  
a column containing some generic icon for each entry, which can then  
act as a proxy for selecting/dragging that row if all else fails.  The  
cursor change probably wouldn't even be necessary, as you wouldn't be  
implementing anything that wasn't standard behaviour in other similar  
lists.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems