Move "Expand on click" to the image link control

[richtabor]

As a follow-up to https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/54916#issuecomment-1745438438 (and related to #50893) let's move the lightbox "Expand on click" control from the inspector to the existing link action control.

Why? You can only have one of these options selected at a time. Connecting them into one singular (and familiar) experience will help reduce confusion when attempting to link an image with the lightbox effect applied (or vise-versa).

Visuals

1. The LinkControl implementation for the image block, as detailed in #50893, with the new control for "Expand on click".
2. The selected state indicating that the click action is set to "Expand on click". Removing should not close the link modal, but bring it back to the initial state above.

[richtabor]

@jasmussen What do you think about using the checkmark to indicate selection, when it's not a token? Fell into that with the exploration on consolidating gallery image linking in https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/55022.

[paaljoachim]

This is very interesting! Thank you for adding this issue, Rich! Is the checkmark used in any other UX in Gutenberg? It seems a few places the icon becomes black when in use. Be it alignment or in the More drop down. In this case color the expand icon black might not be clear enough. So having a checkmark or something like it seems interesting.

[getdave]

I appreciate the effort that has gone into this both here and in discussions in https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/54916.

I would like to restate my previous concerns that using these "suggestions" in the Link UI is going against the grain of how the UX of the control is designed. Why? Because these are search suggestions and not configuration options.

I have a counter proposal which I would appreciate folks considering.

Why not simply default the Link UI to have the current URL of the image pre-selected in the Link UI by default. Then these options:

• Link to Image File
• Link to Attachment
• Expand on click

...could be radio buttons in the Advanced section of the Link UI which is specifically designed to handle this type of configuration option.

If necessary we can change the behaviour to allow us to force the Advanced panel to be open or something to ensure these are exposed by default and are not hidden.

I trust it's at least worth exploring this as an alternative before we press on with a route which will require considerable changes to the underlying components to get right. This could end up expending a lot of effort so I want to ensure we are all confident before we proceed here 🙏

Thanks in advance.

[jasmussen]

...could be radio buttons in the Advanced section of the Link UI which is specifically designed to handle this type of configuration option.

This is actually what we want to avoid.

The thing is, Lightbox is something that you enable once globally, and when you do, conceptually two things happen:

1. attachment pages get disabled, if not de-facto then at least conceptually lightbox is a replacement for it
2. all images are now effectively linked by default

2 is the important piece here, since effectively the image will have a linked behavior in that it links to a larger version of the image, even if the lightbox behavior makes it an inline experience. This is especially important for the user flow: people will experience how clicking an image does something, and therefore intuit that in order to change this behavior they must look in the linking interface.

This is what provides us an opportunitey to surface the lightbox option here, which comes with a few benefits beyond the discoverability:

• It implies, by having to untoggle the lightbox first, that lightbox is mutually exclusive from linking to a destination.
• It surfaces what can otherwise be a very hidden behavior, and puts it front and center.

I also don't share your concern that these suggestions go against the grain of what we're doing. Page links, attachment links, those should increasingly become tokens rather than always just be fixed URLs. Lighbox can be thought of as just another token.

I think there's room for iteration, for a step 1 that we can do today. This is also because the amount of work to change this is something to consider.

[getdave]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Page links, attachment links, those should increasingly become tokens rather than always just be fixed URLs

I agree with this. I'm working towards exactly this experience in https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/46891/.

That said, I'm not yet fully convinced that selecting a single type of "token" outlined above and the proposed UI of selecting between multiple options is the same action. I'm willing to suspend my skepticism and iterate however 😄

My main concern would be if we went with a radio button like approach as shown in this mockup. That does go against the grain of the UX as nowhere else does this control behave in that manner and thus it's unexpected and requires users to learn a new UX pattern.

If we can make these options selectable but avoid making them <radio> (as per original description mockup) then it feels like we're in a good position. Saying "Your image links to a lightbox" seems reasonable.

Thanks for taking the time to go through this 🙇‍♂️

[richtabor]

I trust it's at least worth exploring this as an alternative before we press on with a route which will require considerable changes to the underlying components to get right. This could end up expending a lot of effort so I want to ensure we are all confident before we proceed here

I see these three options following suite of the additional controls at the foot of the LinkControl UI, where we also have "Add new page", or "Add heading link" https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/53147, or "Add block" https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/50888. And link to image file and attachment page are already planned to move as such in https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/50893.

Perhaps the image block can pass its unique controls through to the LinkControl footer.

My main concern would be if we went with https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/55020#issuecomment-1745677605. That does go against the grain of the UX as nowhere else does this control behave in that manner and thus it's unexpected and requires users to learn a new UX pattern.

Yea, that's just one exploration that makes more UX sense, but breaks the existing LinkControl model a bit. We could just stick with the "token" style, which would relay the currently selected option in the link preview, which would need to be "unlinked" to revert the LinkControl state back to initial.

[hanneslsm]

Another thought in a different direction: What if the image that expands on click was a block variation of the image block? This block variation simply does not have a link UI option. If the Lightbox is globally deactivated, the "lightbox image block" acts as a regular image block.

[richtabor]

What if the image that expands on click was a block variation of the image block?

Variations are usually visually distinct. I think it'd be confusing not having a distinction when all the others would.

[hanneslsm]

Variations are usually visually distinct. I think it'd be confusing not having a distinction when all the others would.

True, didn't think about this.