Designers: Re: Inline Edit - clearing the field

[Allison Bloodworth]

Hi Anastasia,

As Daphne mentioned, we a bit talked about this issue in the design  
review on Friday. I'm going to put together some mock-ups with a  
message in the empty fields (in a manner similar to what Eli suggests)  
for the contexts where this makes sense (e.g. where there aren't going  
to be a ton of blank fields on a page--something we'll give advice  
about in the design pattern), but assume whether or not this text  
appears will be configurable by the designer/developer.

I agree with you (and Eli) that there should be a min-width on empty  
fields so that the yellow background shows up on rollover. I'll  
specify this in the story cards.

One other point we were discussing was the fact that when someone  
tries to clear a field that did have a value but *cannot* be empty,  
the user should receive some sort of error message (and the original  
data should probably be saved if the user doesn't enter anything new).  
This (Error Handling) is something that we plan to create storyboards  
for in a future iteration. If it's something you need soon, let us  
know and we'll move that task up in priority.

Cheers,
Allison

On Jun 23, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Eli Cochran wrote:

> I have two suggestions, the first is to have a minimum width. The
> second is to put in default text into the space, such as "Click here
> to edit", which gives the visual clue to the user that the space is
> editable and also helps enforce the min width for browsers that don't
> support min width very well.
>
> Usually when this is done, the default text is displayed in a dimmed
> and/or alternate font.
>
> - Eli
>
> On Jun 23, 2008, at 10:50 AM, Anastasia Cheetham wrote:
>
>>
>>> You'll see that even though the group field is empty the inline edit
>>> discovery interaction of highlight and hover message apply.  For
>>> now, the interaction you describe should probably work the same
>>> way.  One of the challenges here is the varying contexts.  Sometimes
>>> it is really important for an empty field to be empty (in a
>>> particularly busy interface for instance or when there are lots of
>>> empty values so textually describing the emptiness is huge clutter
>>> and noise).  Other times it might not be bad to have a textual
>>> indication that the field is empty.  In Friday's design review we
>>> decided this was likely something controlled by the integrating
>>> app.  Does that make sense?
>>
>>
>> Daphne, thanks for your feedback.
>>
>> Currently, the highlight and hover behaviour is the same, regardless
>> of whether or not the field is empty. The issue is that when the  
>> field
>> is empty, it is very small, so that when you hover over it, for
>> example, the yellow highlight is a very small area, and easy to miss
>> (and probably hard to target).
>>
>> I notice that when you do click on it, the editable field defaults to
>> a minimum width that is larger than the empty field - if the hover
>> highlight were styled to also have this minimum width, might that
>> address the usability issue?
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Anastasia Cheetham                   a.cheetham at utoronto.ca
>> Software Designer, Fluid Project    http://fluidproject.org
>> Adaptive Technology Resource Centre / University of Toronto
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> fluid-work mailing list
>> fluid-work at fluidproject.org
>> http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
>
> . . . . . . . . . . .  .  .   .    .      .         .              .                     .
>
> Eli Cochran
> user interaction developer
> ETS, UC Berkeley
>
>
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> fluid-work at fluidproject.org
> http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work

Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(415) 377-8243
abloodworth at berkeley.edu