1012701 - Eliminate scrolling from in-content preferences panes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Currently the "Advanced" pane and the "Applications" pane have scrolling. This seems unnecessary. In the Advanced pane it's just a bug, as it's not needed, and in the Applications pane scrolling only the list of MIME type associations would probably work best.

Comment 1

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

While I agree that the "scrolling" aspect is important to avoid, I think it's maybe part of a greater issue of "quite sparse" or "not tidy", "feels a bit empty" etc.

Though even if the greater issue is harder to agree upon because it's subject to personal tastes and design preferences, I do agree that scrolling probably shouldn't be required regardless.

Comment 4

[Blair McBride [:Unfocused] (UNAVAILABLE)]

It isn't just those panes. On a newly created profile, the default window size I got resulted in the General pane scrolling. Pretty bad experience on a new profile :(

Comment 5

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Since release drivers beginning to track ICP deployment for 33 as target release can this/its deps get some dev love?

Comment 6

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

This looks fixed to me. Comparing http://screencast.com/t/0N8ANfEVF (Nightly 2015-01-03) to https://bug1014208.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8439538 (the spec), the margins and paddings have since been reduced significantly and I don't see them getting any lesser.

Comment 7

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

(In reply to (Behind on reviews/needinfos) Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #6)

Duped Bug 1014909 Comment 0 hasn't been adressed yet.
"General" & "Privacy" pane (with customized history settings) -> unnecessary scrollbars
font size & spacing/margins -> still too big in general

all compared to x1 zoomed out (10% difference?) version.

Try yourself by
* about:preferences
* DevTools > Responsive Design Tools
* Apply "1366x768"

Comment 8

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Unfortunately, we will never be able to eliminate all scrolling from these pages. People using a vertical resolution of 768px will encounter many scrollbars throughout their web browsing, so this concept will not be anything "new".

I followed the steps that you put in comment #7 and I see how both pages do fit within the resolution, but that disregards the designed sizes and picks an arbitrary resolution as a "measuring stick".

In the future, the in-content preferences will allow searching of preferences across the categories. Search queries have the potential to return a list of preferences that will span multiple viewports in height. We need to make sure that scrolling is effective within the preferences (bug 1091324) but not necessarily eliminated.

I hope that helps to provide some background.

Comment 9

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

This is a wild guess, but could it be that the original design didn't take into account:
1. all the sub-pages of the configuration (and especially the "tallest" one).
2. the popularity of different screen resolutions.

And as a result we're later trying to "fix" the design while implementing it, and deciding that we can't fix it at this stage?

According to various statistics, I'd say at least 40% of users have a vertical resolution of 800px or less, and the vast majority of those with 768px or less* (I _think_ the most popular laptop resolution is still 1366x768).

Would it be possible to get someone from UX comment of this?


[*] for lack of better sources, I found these:

http://bobmckay.com/web/accurate-screen-resolution-usage-statistics-may-2014

http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_screenresxsnapshot.htm?BHT-605b63f5-2307-4723-928a-ec790e477a14.0

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/01/28/browser-operating-system-and-screen-resolution-data-for-gov-uk/

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_Display.asp

Comment 10

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

(In reply to Avi Halachmi (:avih) from comment #9)
> Would it be possible to get someone from UX comment of this?

With the very first question being: how important is it that most/all users won't have to scroll any of the configuration pages, possibly while allowing the assumption that Firefox is maximized (even if the previous implementation didn't need this assumption)?

If it's not very important, then we can live with the current implementation IMO, or maybe try to squeeze it a bit more if it's not hard.

If it's quite important, and if data shows that we're not hitting this goal for many of our users, then some decision will have to be taken on how to handle this misalignment of goals vs implementation.

Comment 11

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Avi Halachmi (:avih) from comment #10)
> (In reply to Avi Halachmi (:avih) from comment #9)
> > Would it be possible to get someone from UX comment of this?
> 
> With the very first question being: how important is it that most/all users
> won't have to scroll any of the configuration pages, possibly while allowing
> the assumption that Firefox is maximized (even if the previous
> implementation didn't need this assumption)?

It is not important that all of the preferences within a pane are visible within the viewport. As we have moved the preferences from a dialog to a tab, the form factor has changed such that scrolling in the preferences matches that of webpages. Users with small resolutions and even users with very large resolutions have learned how to scroll webpages, especially the class of users who feel comfortable poking around the preferences.

Comparing Firefox' preferences to Chrome's preferences (the only other browser I have on my machine that does preferences in-content), their preference page is over 960px tall. See http://screencast.com/t/yRWWlnVFG for a screenshot. They have used this design now for a very long time and we can trust that they have also performed the necessary usability studies and have proper telemetry to let them know that a scrollable preference UI is not a hindrance.

Comment 12

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

jaws, I think your perspective does have merit.

However, most of the panels fit above the fold, while some don't (how many - depends on your resolution), so this creates a mental strain of never being sure if there is or isn't more stuff below the fold - magnified by the fact that "the bottom of the content" doesn't have a clear visual cue - so in a glance you just can't tell if there's more stuff below.

This breaks the "web page analogy" IMO since you don't have the same expectations as a web page when many of the panels fit entirely on screen.

It also doesn't help that vertically the text is quite sparse, so even if there's more stuff below, it's not likely to expect that most of those cases would end up with clipped text - which would be a visual cue that there's more stuff below.

Slightly off topic, I think we can create such visual cue by having the "content" surrounded by rounded border, possibly with different color shade outside this border, such that it's clear just by glancing at the page if it ends above the fold or if it continues below it.

But again, beyond my own personal opinion and yours, I think we should get a UX guy to comment on this subject. Then we can discuss this.

Comment 13

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

(In reply to Avi Halachmi (:avih) from comment #12)
> But again, beyond my own personal opinion and yours, I think we should get a
> UX guy to comment on this subject. Then we can discuss this.

s/UX guy/someone from UX/ . No gender discrimination intended.. :)

Comment 14

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

FWIW, I filed the wrong bug here. The description should have been way more specific, maybe something like "Eliminate scrolling from in-content preference panes when the only thing not in the viewport is a bit of padding, which is the case on my 1440x900 monitor on the General, Search, Applications and Privacy panes".

But even that's not really actionable, for the same reasons Jared has already stated, so I agree with a WORKSFORME/WONTFIX.