Drag and drop behaviour for the Layout Customizer

[Aaron Zeckoski]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Allison Bloodworth
<abloodworth at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I definitely believe that we should support the i-Google style preview that
> our 'drag and drop layout preview' pattern supports. However, I had also not
> noticed before that (as Eli pointed out) the iGoogle portlets are all the
> same size. If this pattern is used for columns with different widths, I'm
> guessing this may complicate things from both a coding and user perspective.
> For instance, how do you clearly tell a user that they cannot drag a portlet
> from a wider column into a narrow column? It may be that there would be
> enough feedback with the fact that a drop target did not appear, but that
> would be something I think we should user test. Another question would be
> whether we even want to prevent that interaction...should users be able to
> drag portlets around without worrying about column width? I'm guessing the
> coding for this could be complicated. This could result in a page like this:

Facebook handles this interaction by not allowing the "wider" widgets
to be dropped into the "narrow" column and putting a message across
the widget that is being dragged ("This box cannot be moved into this
column"). You can try this out on facebook in the profile view. I have
found this clear and easy to understand.

-AZ


-- 
Aaron Zeckoski (aaronz at vt.edu)
Senior Research Engineer - CARET - Cambridge University
[http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/~aaronz/]
Sakai Fellow - [http://aaronz-sakai.blogspot.com/]