launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14 November 2011 16:51, Huw Wilkins <huw.wilkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 13/11/11 02:49, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> On Nov 12, 2011, at 06:39 PM, Martin Pool wrote:

>>> and this doesn't always work for ajaxy links.  However, it is
>>> possible to make ajaxy links have a regular target that can be opened
>>> in a different window, and some of Launchpad's green links do work
>>> that way, and perhaps the others could just be considered (maybe low
>>> priority) bugs.
>>
>> I do think it's nice that Launchpad visually identifies links that pop up
>> ajaxy windows and those that transport you somewhere else.

Just to be precise, green doesn't reliably mean "pops up a window", just
"does something short of a full page load."

>>  I've certainly
>> gotten used to the green meme for that, and I think it's one of the
things
>> about Launchpad that works well.
>
> I agree that this is a useful metaphor. It's similar to desktop apps
having
> an elipsis in menu items to signify a window will open. I think know
you're
> about to do a page load is a useful bit of information in some cases,
> irrelevant in others.

A few things that might help establish just what benefit people get out of
it:

What are you going to do differently if you know this?

Is it a thing where we want the user to look before they leap, or where
they need to look before they leap?

What happens when we get it wrong and
- a green link is something you can open in a new tab by control-clicking
(fairly often)
- a blue link actually does something javascripty (happens occasionally)
- a green link actually doesn't do js but opens a new page

At the time green links were first implemented, navigating to a new page
would lose all your form content, which could be a catastrophe. However,
modern browsers seem to have fixed that for us by keeping the form content
in their history stack.

> I want to think about how we can do this better. If it really is important
> that a user know whether they are about to do a page load then I don't
think
> making the link green is a strong enough identifier. It wasn't until I
> joined the Launchpad team and read a bug about the colour of the green
links
> that I discovered what a green link meant.
>
> It is possible that we could use buttons, or place an icon with the link
> instead of colouring the link. I'm sure there are more options.

If you look at other sites that use ajax well, such as say gmail or
askubuntu, it seems to me that:

* none of them use color to distinguish things implemented as ajax
* they try to make links all just work whether you open in a new tab or
otherwise. for instance I've never before control-clicked the gmail
"Drafts" label, but it turns out that it works, and I get a new tab holding
all my drafts.
* if you do control-click on something that doesn't cope with opening a new
tab, the situation is normally recoverable
* the shape of the control, rather than the color, conveys something about
what kind of behaviour it implies: is it like a button, like a link, like a
tab, like a drop down, like a list item
* if you can't control-click a thing, then you discover this in the
straightforward way that doing so does nothing or does the regular action,
but in the same tab
* expert users can look for a url in the status bar to predict whether the
thing will do a page load
* they're converging on doing ajax history type things so that there is
much less of a visible difference between navigating by regular page loads
vs ajax

-- 
Martin