tmp.txt

Thank you!  These are great.

Here's my gut investigation so far:

The multi-item vs. single-item distinction is a really good point.  In
things like GMail, it's a multi-item system, there's a breakdown between:

- the items you can select
- a small set of operations you can apply to the items in bulk

The operations (delete, etc.) appear up top on the menu bar to be
applied in bulk.

The thing I'm doing right now is single-item, i.e. you would only want
to look at details, or edit, or delete, a single item at a time.  But
it seems super jank to have

- item 1 [edit] [delete]
- item 2 [edit] [delete]
- item 3 [edit] [delete]

 From where I'm standing, it looks like the cleaner options might be:


OPTION 1: details inside the link detail page

The list items themselves are links

- item 1
- item 2
- item 3

When you click into any one item you get all the options

ITEM 1
- [edit]
- [delete]
- [etc]


OPTION 2: one context-menu per item

- item 1 [cog/menu icon]
- item 2 [cog/menu icon]
- item 3 [cog/menu icon]

When you click the cog/menu icon per item, it pops open a menu where
you can select one of [edit], [delete], [etc].

I noticed, iOS is totally OK with having one configuration option per
line item always visible, even if it's repetitive.  The Dropbox web UI
tries to avoid the repetive icon by a) only having stuff pop up when
you hover, b) only having the context menu available if you right
click on a line item, but both of these have discoverability issues
(especially the right click context menu, which I totally don't expect
in a web browser.)


I think I'm going to try out option 2 for now.


Thank you for the links/response!

Hope your day is going well.

- Elliot


On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 01:30:39PM -0700, Christina wrote:
>There are a variety of design patterns, which you may be looking for.
>There's not one prescribed one, because it's dependent on the usage.
>Are users going to want to manipulate more than one item at a time,
>typically? Or do they usually engage one a time-- or is that the
>behavior that you'll want to use? Is it mobile?  You may find
>http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ useful-- it talks about each
>pattern and when to use it, and the pros and cons.  There are a bunch
>of books that you may find useful, but for your purposes, maybe check
>out
>http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design-ebook/dp/B008NC0XR2/--