Need suggestions for history navigation
Brett Wilson
You may have noticed that in the latest nightly, the calendar in places
has been removed.
The major problem with the calendar was that it wasn't necessarily clear
what it did. Lots of people didn't even realize that it was for
selecting history, and its presentation didn't really make that clear.
It was also ambiguous whether the selection was a filter over the
current search or whether it would start a new search (it was the latter).
One idea is to include the calendar inside the left tree like this:
http://maxradi.us/post/moz_wiki/calendar_in_tree.png
(it would need to be styled much better). This may be technically
infeasable, however, and some people just don't like it.
From my understanding, the current (non-)plan is that the calendar will
stay in the advanced query builder, but that line in the query builder
will appear whenever the history item is selected. This way you can
click the date entry field and then select the day you want to see from
the popup calendar like you do now. I don't really like the
inconvenience of this and the fact that it seems relatively undiscoverable.
Can anybody contribute other ideas? How can we make it easy and
discoverable to navigate your history?
If we do make the calendar more prominant, it will need a lot of work.
For example, it should scroll if you drag off the bottom. It will need
to be made accessable This may also end up being very challenging.
Volunteers would be needed.
The places popup:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places:User_Interface#Places_Popup
also may need some navigation if it is to indeed be a substitute for the
history sidebar.
Brett
Mossop
> One idea is to include the calendar inside the left tree like this:
> http://maxradi.us/post/moz_wiki/calendar_in_tree.png
> (it would need to be styled much better). This may be technically
> infeasable, however, and some people just don't like it.
I think the calendar is overkill in most circumstances. The chances of
me wanting to look at a single day before a few days ago is slim, I'm
just don't have that good a memory. I think just a couple of simple
filters in the history item as there used to be: Today, Yesterday, Last
7 days, Last 30 days. They should cover most of the cases.
Mossop
Adam Kowalczyk
Good point.
However, there are still some common cases that these simple filters
don't cover. What if I want to see Today and Yesterday at the same time?
Or last 3 days? Having to do Advanced Search for this is a noticeable
regression of usability.
I think that History could expand to Today, Yesterday, Last
Week, Last Month as you propose and the calendar could appear in a
popup, in the same manner as in Advanced Search. The question is, how
could it be activated? A "Custom" entry under the standard filters? Any
ideas?
- Adam
Myk Melez
> From my understanding, the current (non-)plan is that the calendar will
> stay in the advanced query builder, but that line in the query builder
> will appear whenever the history item is selected. This way you can
> click the date entry field and then select the day you want to see from
> the popup calendar like you do now. I don't really like the
> inconvenience of this and the fact that it seems relatively undiscoverable.
>
> Can anybody contribute other ideas? How can we make it easy and
> discoverable to navigate your history?
For searches on a term against recent history (perhaps the most common
search of all), the calendarless simple search form is obviously
insufficient, because it doesn't let users select a date range at all;
but adding the advanced search's date range picker is overcomplicated,
because it makes users navigate up to four fields to select that range
(even with appropriate defaults, users still have to at least look at
those fields to determine that they are set correctly).
Instead of exposing the advanced search's picker, I think we'd be better
off adding a basic date range drop-down to the simple search form. The
drop-down could contain values like "last day," "last week," and "last
month," which accommodate the majority of recent history searches while
being much easier to select.
For users whose needs aren't satisfied by those values, we could include
a "Custom..." item in that drop-down menu which opened the advanced
search picker. And we could even populate that menu with recent custom
selections, so a user who selects "last three days" in one search would
see that option in the simple search picker the next time she does a
history search.
Obviously, we'd have to have some heuristic for determining when the
user is done defining a date range--perhaps when she focuses a non-date
field, or maybe not until she picks a history item.
> If we do make the calendar more prominant, it will need a lot of work.
> For example, it should scroll if you drag off the bottom. It will need
> to be made accessable This may also end up being very challenging.
It sounds very challenging, but I can imagine a calendar which is both
accessible and more usable than the current advanced search picker. A
couple thoughts:
We might expose a portion of the previous/next month on the edges of the
calendar container as a clue that one can drag in that direction to get
to that month.
We could make the calendar keyboard-accessible by treating days and
weeks as characters and lines are treated in a text editor: horizontal
arrow keys navigate from day to day, vertical arrow keys navigate from
week to week, and holding down the "shift" key while navigating selects
the range you navigate across.
-myk
Nikitas Liogkas
for this kind of thing:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=420&application=firefox
Maybe, you can get some good ideas by looking at that...
nikitas
"Myk Melez" <m...@mozilla.org> wrote in message
news:441C8D43...@mozilla.org...
Brett Wilson
easy to do in the current system:
http://maxradi.us/post/moz_wiki/history_without_calendar.png
History is now a folder that contains some common searches. Clicking
these always shows the query builder date line so you can change the
range of history. We also add "next" and "previous" links in the title
for the content. This would take you to the next/previous N days where N
is the length of your current search (day, week, month).
It's easy to get the common searches, and also easy to move forward or
backward in time. Since the query builder is visible, it is obvious how
to change the date to something specific if I want.
Brett
Adam Kowalczyk
I like the idea of History expanding to the most common searches.
However, I think that the query builder visible all the time is too
heavy and it is as much of an overkill as the calendar. :) In my
opinion, the power of Advanced Search is not needed nearly often enough
for it bloat the window all the time.
Calendar can effectively serve the "on", "after" and "in the last" query
rules and thus cover the overwhelming majority of needs. It is used to
pick a date in the query builder anyway, so why have the rest of the
builder here? Ability to use the calendar from a popup, without the
entire Advanced Search seems to be a good middle-ground. So my proposal
is to make History expand to the most common searches just like in your
mockup and have a (Custom Date) button which pops up the calendar. It
could appear in the right corner of the content header, next to
"Next/Previous Day", for example.
- Adam