Drag and drop behaviour for the Layout Customizer

[erin yu]

Thanks Aaron, I was about to mention Facebook as well.

You can drag and drop stuff from the wider column to the narrower and  
vice versa, and the contents will adjust itself to fit in the column.  
e.g. If you drag a box from the wide column to the narrow, the box  
will lengthen to fit the contents.

But, some things stay in one column and cannot be moved (like the  
"Wall"), and when you try to drag these ones, it will display the red  
warning box, like Aaron pointed out.

I find this approach to be intuitive as well. I shift things around  
all the time. :)


On 18-Apr-08, at 3:36 PM, Aaron Zeckoski wrote:

> 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/]
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