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Sidebar usability review

Minutes: 2001-10-23

Agenda

Select items that have been raised often that we should address in the next few milestones:
  1. Differentiating hidden vs. collapsed state for the user
  2. Search popping open being annoying
  3. Grippy too small (splitter?)
  4. Overflow management when tab headers usurp all sidebar real estate ("too many" tabs)

Attendees

  • Aaron Leventhal <aaronl@netscape.com>
  • Andrew Woolridge <andreww@netscape.com>
  • Dan Veditz <dveditz@netscape.com>
  • Marlon Bishop <marlon@netscape.com>
  • Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>
  • Samir Gehani <sgehani@netscape.com>
  • Todd Pringle <tpringle@netscape.com>

Resolution

  1. Differentiating hide vs. collapsed state for the user
    • Stick with plan to add a "close" button (a button with an 'x' icon on the far right top of the sidebar)
    • Add an icon on the extreme left side of the personal toolbar that users can click to reopen sidebar
    • Eliminate collapsed state (w.r.t. item 3: search popping open especially)
    • Now we have only two states:
      • 'open' (formerly 'shown')
      • 'closed' (formerly 'hidden')
    • The 'collapsed' state is gone and is really an instance of non-default sidebar width: zero-width sidebar
    • Action item: marlon to design; samir to implement
  2. Search popping open being annoying
    • Show non-intrusive message in search tab once sidebar pops open with ability for user to say:
      • Do you want the sidebar to pop open every time you search?  [Yes] [No]
      • Along the lines of the IE 6 on Mac popup when you visit certain sites: non-intrusive area above web content area that is pleasing/"non-annoying" visually and can be ignored conveniently.
    • Still pop open though but attack problem by not stealing focus while still giving user easy way to disable feature.
    • Action item: marlon to design; samir to implement
  3. Grippy too small (splitter?)
    • This item is less important since we have addressed item 1.
    • The problem with grippies is product-wide so we need not address here. 
    • Action item: none.
  4. Overflow management when tab headers usurp all sidebar real estate ("too many" tabs)
    • Add a pref with the max number of sidebar tabs a user wants to display at one time.
    • Add up and down navigation arrows that move sets of tabs (using above pref to determine set size) to bottom of sidebar.
    • Only show up/down navigation arrows when number of sidebar tabs exceeds the number set by user in the aforementioned pref.
    • Action item: samir to implement using menu arrow icons for consistency