Another spin-off from #539682: Replace hard-coded release download table with a view ...
There are a few other things we could do to improve the UI of the download tables on project pages:
A) We could add a title attribute to the icons in front of each table header, to give a little more help if people hover. Something like:
green check: "The releases below are recommended by the maintainer as the one you should use"
yellow warn: "The releases below are not recommended by the maintainer unless you know what you're doing"
red error: "The releases below are periodically repackaged and are unstable for use on production sites"
B) We could reuse the conditional headers stuff like I put in the D7 plugin manager -- if there's only one table, it doesn't need its own sub header.
Dries was apparently confused when looking at http://drupal.org/project/mollom and sent me this in email:
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #9 | 647936-9.download-tables-no-icons.patch | 1.57 KB | dww |
| #9 | 647936-9.download-tables-no-icons.png | 49.98 KB | dww |
| #5 | Voila_Capture_8.png | 34.25 KB | avpaderno |
| dries-mollom-project-page.jpg | 156.39 KB | dww |
Comments
Comment #1
dries commentedAh, looking at the Views page made things 'click'. When looking at the Mollom page, I didn't understand "Recommended releases" was a _title_. I interpreted it as being a legend but then I didn't see the checkmark anywhere else on the page, so I thought it was a bug. I don't think a help text would have made me less confused. Icons in front of section titles is not a common UI pattern, which probably explains why I was confused. My recommendation would be to just drop the icons. I believe that would have prevented my confusion.
Thanks for turning this into an issue. :)
Comment #2
dwwThanks for turning this into an issue. :)
Gladly. ;)
Yeah, honestly, the icons were there before these tables had row coloring again. We might not need them anymore (although I kind of like the extra visual hint, especially for "other" and "dev").
I think (B) from the initial post would be the biggest win. If there's only one table, remove the sub-headers. Then, it should all make sense all the time...
Comment #3
dries commentedI think we should definitely do (b) but still might want to remove the icons in addition to that. Icons in front of section titles is just not a common nor expected UI pattern, IMO.
Comment #4
michelleI'm no UX expert but I wanted to put in my +1 for the icons. I think it adds a bit to the coloring and gives more visual information.
Michelle
Comment #5
avpadernoLooking at the project page of Devel, I noticed that the development snapshots are not shorted basing on the Drupal version with which are compatible.
I am not sure if I should report this here, as this is a report about improving the download UI; I apologize if this is not the right place.
Comment #6
dww@kiamlaluno: Thanks for the report, but that's a separate problem from what we're discussing here. Moved that to #648322: Download tables should be sorted by core version.
Comment #7
dwwCommitted and deployed changes to project_release.module implementing (A), the conditional headers:
http://drupal.org/project/mollom
vs.
http://drupal.org/project/views
http://drupal.org/project/og
Should we call this fixed?
Comment #8
michelleLooks good to me. :)
Michelle
Comment #9
dwwBased on another quick IRC chat with yoroy and Bojhan, decided (a little bit reluctantly) to just remove all the icons:
http://drupal.org/project/views
Committed to HEAD, imported into d.o SVN, and deployed.
Comment #10
michelleAwww, that's too bad. Those icons really helped make the release types clear. Sad to see them go. Strange that the usability people voted to make something less usable.
Michelle