Improve UI Edit mode experience

gentlecolts commented 11 months ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

This seems like something that, in my opinion, would be very beneficial to the overall platform experience. In particular, three major issues need addressing (maybe more? feedback appreciated!)

UI edit mode is hard to discover and cumbersome to work with due to being hidden behind a button sequence with no further prompting
UI edit mode is unusable in desktop
Review of the security/safety implication of operating in this mode

Describe the solution you'd like

I propose, for the first point, that a UI button for accessing the mode be presented premanently in the dashboard, perhaps worded as "Edit Dashboard" or similar, as "UI edit mode" itself does not appear to me to be intuitive to a new user. The presence of this button would help users discover that the dashboard is, in the first place, actually able to be customized, which would invite more user creativity and content, and empower personalization. It would also help users resolve issues that arise from migration, such as ⁠NCR related items on the homescreen…

I'm not able to comment on the second point, as I'm not sure what the challenges specifically are regarding making edit mode work in desktop, though in theory this seems very within reach. I imagine having a visual means of interacting with this mode, rather than relying on controller-only gestures, would at least be a step towards this goal.

As for the third point, I once again admit I'm no expert here, but some suggestions may be:

Having undo functionality for edit mode (UI edit mode undo buttons only need be present when in UI edit mode, so I don't believe this'll lead to radial menu bloat)
ensuring facets cannot inhibit user interaction (bricking the user by paralyzing them in user space)
review of what more sensitive contexts are accessible in UI edit mode (screen/file access for example)
providing obvious means of resetting the dashboard to a default state (Command line for it is useful, but not, in my opinion, accessible enough for most users)

Describe alternatives you've considered

The solutions i propose above are deliberately open ended. I suspect this will take a while to fully refine

Additional Context

zangooseoo

JackTheFoxOtter commented 5 months ago

I was just thinking about this in the context of the settings rework, and I agree that "UI Edit Mode" probably should be renamed, maybe something like "Customization Mode" or just "Menu Customization". A big reason for that is that I've had countless of interactions with users that, when talking about "Edit Mode" (The world setting), they confused it with "UI Edit Mode", because many people already abbreviate that one with "Edit Mode".

JackTheFoxOtter commented 5 months ago

Having undo functionality for edit mode (UI edit mode undo buttons only need be present when in UI edit mode, so I don't believe this'll lead to radial menu bloat)

This would be somewhat difficult, as you don't actually have an intuitive way to open your context menu in user space.

ensuring facets cannot inhibit user interaction (bricking the user by paralyzing them in user space)

I don't think this is related to edit mode, I'd suggest making security improvements a separate topic.

review of what more sensitive contexts are accessible in UI edit mode (screen/file access for example)

I don't see why this would be relevant? UI Edit Mode isn't really security critical. It's not like enabling that suddenly gives facets more acces to your userspace than what they already had. It's just a toggle to turn on and off the facet moving features.

providing obvious means of resetting the dashboard to a default state (Command line for it is useful, but not, in my opinion, accessible enough for most users)

Absolutely agreed. This should just be a button in the new setting page.

shiftyscales commented 3 months ago

1) Discussed with Frooxius in our coding team sync today the possibility of introducing UI Edit Mode as a setting. This would in turn prevent the case of new users pressing a button and accidentally messing up their UI- since it'd require users to discover, and enable the setting in the first place.

It would also mean that the user could then take a copy of the setting as a facet to place elsewhere on their dash/facet containers wherever they like.

2) This request is covered by the separate/split off issue #628.

Yellow-Dog-Man / Resonite-Issues