337825 - Add Bookmark dialog: microsummary picker should be disabled or hidden when no summary is available

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Graveyard :: Microsummaries, defect, P1)

Description

[Steffen Wilberg]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1a2) Gecko/20060513 BonEcho/2.0a2

In the Add Bookmark dialog, the microsummary picker displays "" in the closed state. If you click on the expander, it looks like this:

         Don't Display a Summary   V
         Don't Display a Summary

The menu list should be disabled when no summary is available and there's nothing to choose.

Comment 1

[Simon Bünzli]

Why not rather hide the selection when there's nothing to choose? I suppose users will be wondering about what a "Summary" might be, whether the picker is enabled or not - unless they can see what a summary might look like. And I'm not sure MicroSummaries are that important to expose them that visibly and have users confused all over the place...

OTOH: Maybe rewording might help, e.g.:

Display as: [Bookmark Name (no dynamic summary) v]

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

need to do something about this, in some form.

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

beltzner and I chatted about this at XTech and came up with some ideas about what to do.  cc:ing him, as I think he has notes from that discussion.

Comment 4

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Myk and I chatted and wondered what could be done to make uSummaries:
 - more noticable/discoverable
 - less confusing in terms of presentation to user
 - gracefully enhance the act of creating a bookmark

We also considered changing the name of the feature, since while uSummary is a nice way of describing it, people keep on confusing it with RSS and not relating it back to bookmarks. Perhaps we can take a page from Microsoft and call them "Smart Titles" or "Live Titles" (echoing Live Bookmarks).

Here's some ASCII art of what we came up with.

Option #1

 .-------------------------------------------------------.
 | Name:       [ DOWJ 10706.14 (-86.44/0.80%)      ]     |
 |                                                       |
 | Create in:  [ Bookmarks Toolbar                 ] [v] |
 |                                                       |
 |              .----------------------------------.     |
 | Live titles: |#DOWJ 10706.14 (-86.44/0.80%)###|^|     |
 |              | DOWJ Down 86.44/0.80%          |#|     |
 |              | DOWJ (v 86.44/0.80%)           |v|     |
 |              '----------------------------------'     |
 |                                                       |
 |                                   ( Cancel ) ( Add )  |
 '-------------------------------------------------------'

 - Name field is pre-populated with the page title
 - if user types in there, they can change the name
 - if user selects a "Live Title", it gets highlighted, and populated into the Name field as grey-text
 - if the user types in the Name field again, it becomes a non live-title, and the highlight in the live titles area disappears
 - if no Live Titles exist, the UI just doesn't show up, and it looks like the existing bookmarks dialog

Option # 2

 .-------------------------------------------------------.
 | Name:       [|Dow Jones Indexes||||||||||||||||v]     |
 |             |----------------------- Live Titles|     |
 | Create in:  | DOWJ 10706.14 (-86.44/0.80%)      | [v] |
 |             | DOWJ Down 86.44/0.80%             |     |
 |             | DOWJ (v 86.44/0.80%)              |     |
 |             '-----------------------------------'     |
 |                                                       |
 |                                   ( Cancel ) ( Add )  |
 '-------------------------------------------------------'

 - if Live Titles exist, the name field becomes a drop-down
 - we use a style like we're currently using for search suggestions to indicate that items in the drop down are "Live Titles"
 - user can select from Live Titles (which are uneditable) and the normal title (which is)
 - typing in the box reverts to a normal title
 - to aid in discoverability, we could pre-select a Live Title

Option 3
 - state 1
 .-------------------------------------------------------.
 | Name:       [ Dow Jones Indexes                 ] [v] |
 |                                                       |
 | Create in:  [ Bookmarks Toolbar                 ] [v] |
 |                                                       |
 |                                   ( Cancel ) ( Add )  |
 '-------------------------------------------------------'

 - state 2 (clicked on [v] button beside name)
 .-------------------------------------------------------.
 | Name:       [ DOWJ 10706.14 (-86.44/0.80%)      ] [^] |
 |                                                       |
 |              .----------------------------------.     |
 | Live titles: |#DOWJ 10706.14 (-86.44/0.80%)###|^|     |
 |              | DOWJ Down 86.44/0.80%          |#|     |
 |              | DOWJ (v 86.44/0.80%)           |v|     |
 |              '----------------------------------'     |
 |                                                       |
 | Create in:  [ Bookmarks Toolbar                 ] [v] |
 |                                                       |
 |                                   ( Cancel ) ( Add )  |
 '-------------------------------------------------------'

 - user clicks the [v] button next to the name which only appears if uSummaries are available
 - when that button is clicked, the Name field becomes whatever the user has selected
 - user can collapse the area by clicking [^]
 - if user types over LiveTitle, the name field becomes active and the LiveTitle gets deselected as per Option 1 

Pros/Cons

 + Option 1 is very discoverable
 - Option 1 is heavier and has a slightly strange interaction model
 + Option 2/3 is almost exactly like our current dialog
 - Option 2/3 might not be easily discovered

Random Thoughts

 - we could append (Live Title) after Live Titles in the Name field to aid discoverability
 - see bug 341366 to discuss whether or not we want to add UI for adding/removing uSummary generators

Comment 5

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

(and no, I don't know why I used |||| to represent row-highlight in option 2, and ### everywhere else ... I'm fickle!)

Comment 6

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

err, see bug 341336, actually, for the adding/removing uSummary generator issue. Not the one I referenced up there which is for unicode characters, and a typo.

Comment 7

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: patch v1 for branch: implements option #2

Here's an implementation of option #2 for the old bookmarks system.  It works just as beltzner described, except that the first item in the drop-down menu is the current user-entered name, so a user who selects a microsummary and then changes her mind can go back and select the user-entered name from the drop-down menu.

Also, based on the description of option #2, it isn't entirely clear what should happen when the user selects a microsummary and then tries to edit it by typing into the text box.  Do we do nothing because microsummaries are "uneditable", or do we convert the microsummary into the user-entered name because "typing in the box reverts to a normal title"?

The current implementation does the latter, since I thought that was more likely to be what option #2 was describing, but I think it should do the former, since: 

1. microsummaries are rarely going to be very useful as static titles (even
   with a bit of editing);
2. even if they were, there's very little efficiency to be gained from 
   selecting a microsummary and then editing it into a static title vs. 
   entering the static title from scratch;
3. converting the microsummary into the user-entered name loses the 
   previous user-entered name, which we don't want users to do inadvertently;
4. users may be confused into thinking they can edit the microsummary and
   it'll still be "live".

Of course, the third option that would satisfy both "uneditable" and "converts to regular title upon typing" is to make the selected microsummary uneditable but immediately replace it with the previous user-entered name when the user starts typing.  This seems pretty jarring to me.  Is this the behavior that option #2 is suggesting?

And if so, does that make it unnecessary to have a user-entered name item in the drop-down menu?  I'd think that even if we enabled the "return to regular title upon typing" behavior, we'd still want a more discoverable way of getting back to that name.

Comment 8

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 225811 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1 for branch: implements option #2

Doing nothing seems odd to me, since it will be hard for the user to understand that they're locked out due to it being a live title. Perhaps we can reach a compromise by saying that typing causes it to revert to the user-entered entry and also open the drop down to show the user what's happened (ie: that we've automatically selected that entry again since the others are read-only)

We can iron that behaviour out later, though, if you just want to land this patch atm for testing.

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Comment on attachment 225811 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1 for branch: implements option #2

looks good, let's see what people think (I think I'm a fan already)

Comment 10

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Fixed checked in to trunk and 1.8 branch.  Leaving bug open pending Places implementation.

Comment 11

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Hrm. The change of the feature name had quite an l10n-impact, sadly the patch didn't change key names. Seems that quite a few locales didn't get this change.

Posted to .l10n about this, http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.l10n/browse_frm/thread/acb18f1e9960da67/f1a39fcb30f69efa#f1a39fcb30f69efa.

Comment 12

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

This has since been fixed in Places.