unity-design team mailing list archive

[Pablo Quirós <mr.polmac@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Dylan!

I love your idea of having a widget that represents "the window", but
> I'm not too keen on the gestures; the rest of our desktop has no
> reliance on the things, aiming more for physical, direct interaction.
>

Yes, I know it's a change of concept, but not necessarily a big one. In
fact, it's in some way more "physical" dragging something up to maximize the
window and down to minimize than pushing a button to make the same action.
In the end, if we change our assumed ideas, it's really more natural and
intuitive. We'd just need to learn a new way of doing things.

We could enhance that design by having it work
> within a workspace, too, so you don't need to use the overlay mode to
> add a workspace visually; dragging the Esfera widget would zoom out,
> revealing hotspots on the screen to perform different interactions.
> (Could even be the same list you describe).
>

So, if I've understood well, what you propose is that, when dragging the
widget, some hotspots will appear around it, and dragging it to them would
produce different actions, right?

This is an interesting idea. It'd be easier to use by new users, who will
see more clearly the possible actions to do, and we'd avoid problems caused
by poor gesture recognition. But, as a disadvantage, the actions would be
slower to perform than if we use gestures; we would loose the intuitiveness
and speed that the gestures offer. Anyway, I think it's something to think
about.

But I deffinitely wouldn't wait until the user releases the widget to do the
action; this would make it slower and feel less useful. I'd perform the
action before he releases it, and if it's unwanted or he changes his mind,
he just needs to take the widget back to undo it. This way it would be very
quick and responsive. Using gestures, the action would be performed as soon
as a gesture is recognized; using hotspots, it would be performed as soon as
the hotspot is reached, but they should be close to the widget to make it
fast.

At that point, it may be interesting to improve drag / drop in
> general. I believe the system can be aware of any droppable areas for
> the current drag operation, so why do we torture our users by forcing
> them to drag a widget all that way there over a 38" 4k pixel monitor?
> Snapping or physics (think kinetic scroll, with magnetic hot zones)
> could be worth some experimentation. (All things considered, the end
> result of that would basically feel like gestures, but be more
> wholesome interactions).
>

This seems an amazing idea to explore!