Examine UI for overall UX issues and propose solutions to improve it
While most of the components have been reworked and vastly improved over time there are some UX issues with how features are interconnected in rooms. This issue is intended to compile a list of potential problems and propose solutions for those.
- Naming of features
- Layout of the room overview
- this issue and also #737 (closed)
- Creation/deletion of content groups
- particify/dev/common-concerns#12
- Content groups and quick nav bar
Room overview
Current layout/positioning
Currently, UI elements belonging to different features are scattered. This can be quite confusing to new users. Also, this makes it harder to extend the UI or to hide features because this could require repositioning. I've color coded the elements on the UI to visualize this issue.
- Overall (Room) - blue
- Contents - red
- Comments - green
- Live Survey - violet
- Assets - orange
As you can see, especially for the content feature UI elements are in multiple places.
Action buttons (5)
With a increasing number of features, I don't think, the action buttons are a good fit for navigation anymore. Some feature might need multiple of these buttons (contents and their groups) while other features do not fit in at all (assets). Some of the buttons match those of the quick navigation bar (comments, survey) while others do not (create content). The application has evolved and there a lot of different use cases, so there aren't a few actions which can be highlighted through large buttons.
Suggestions
- Header (1, 3, 4)
- Reposition the UI elements: Move the title and number to the left. This is more consistent with other views (e.g. groups) and, more importantly, opens up room on the right side. We could use this additional room to move important actions out of the menu (we are already over using "..." menus). The statistics is part of the content group view, so we might remove it here.
- Action buttons (5), Feature grouping
- Feature shouldn't be scattered, so we need to group their UI elements into sections. As a consequence, we need to get rid of the group of unrelated action buttons. Feature related sections could have an overview and the most important actions. It might help if we add headings and a very short description text to the sections. Especially the file list or the file upload button look a bit out of place without some information.
- With the removal of the "Create content" action button, we could instead add a button to the specific content groups. Furthermore, a "Create collection" button would be required. But currently, this approach is not feasible because a content needs to be exist before groups can be created.
Discussion results (2021-07-05)
- Only use action buttons for main navigation (corresponding to quick nav bar) - not for specific functionality of a feature. I.e., we will remove the "Moderation" and "Add content" buttons.
- There will be no content creation directly from the overview. Content creation will always be initiated from the "question series" view.
- We will remove the statistics button from the overview.
- Have sections for features (if applicable) with similar structure, e.g. News (future), Question series, Questionnaire (future), Files/Assets. All of these have a button to create new items in common which should be placed consistently.
- Adjust header as mentioned above.