Irregular review: Errands
Hi @mrvladus,
the Circle committe noticed that Errands recently received some significant changes to its interface and feature set, some of which are a bit out of step with standard design patterns. Generally speaking it'd be good if you could sync with the committee and/or other relevant parts of the community (e.g. the design team in the case of UI changes) for major changes to the app.
I did a quick review of the latest stable release from Flathub, these are the main issues I found:
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The task properties sidebar feels like a step backwards compared to the nicer semantics of expanding and inline editing. I'd rethink whether the additional features can be integrated in a less intrusive way (if they're needed at all, e.g. completion percentage doesn't seem very useful).
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The task properties sidebar being to the left of the task list (by default) is a highly unusual pattern. Panes should be hierarchical from left to right, so if you add a sidebar with content relative to something in the second pane it should be in a third pane to its right. If you decide to keep the sidebar please at least remove the setting and always keep it on the right. -
The task that is currently active (i.e. whose properties are visible in the sidebar) has no active state styling, which is a bit disorienting. -
A few of the new features seem a bit half-baked, e.g. there's no way to filter by tag, date, or priority. The notes field is incredibly prominent and takes up a lot of space, but is likely not among the most used of these features. If you keep the sidebar, it'd be good to prioritize the items better. -
The Trash sidebar item at the bottom doesn't look like a sidebar navigation item, and below a certain window height it completely disappears. I'd make this a standard sidebar item.
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The bottom toolbar disappearing below a certain height happens in other panes too:
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The Import List menu with just one entry should probably be in the primary menu, menus with just one or two entries should be avoided
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Padding on the right side of the sidebar items' menu button is too large, it should match the vertical padding
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The disabled "scroll up" button is confusing, is there a specific reason why this is needed? If not it'd be better to remove it, or hide it instead of disabling it. -
Options like this that change the basic behavior of the app are not recommended -- The app should have a workflow that just works, not expose UI design tradeoffs to them.
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The breakpoints need to be adjusted, the sidebar should unfold as early as possible but currently it's possible to get into weird states like this:
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The "Complete Button Size" option seems superfluous, what's the use case for smaller check boxes?
It's not expected for you to fix all of these immediately, but it'd be good to get at least a few of the bigger ones fixed for the next release. If you have questions or there's anything the committee can help with, please let us know here or on Matrix :)
Edited by Tobias Bernard