ENH - Reevaluate environment selection workflow

trallard commented 1 year ago

Context

Derived from https://github.com/conda-incubator/conda-store-ui/issues/269

Right now, conda-store is performing several implicit actions that should be explicit: build a new environment, activate the newly created environment, etc.

Additionally, specific terms and workflows might need to be clearer to new users. (See https://github.com/conda-incubator/conda-store-ui/pull/271#issuecomment-1688568916)

Overall, the whole Edit/Build/Activate workflow (and UI) needs to be revised and improved.

Value and/or benefit

Improved user experience
Changes should be explicit, thus contributing to user's confidence

Anything else?

No response

pavithraes commented 1 year ago

Related issues:

peytondmurray commented 5 months ago

Hey all, I wanted to add my recent experience here as a new conda-store-ui user:

I was recently trying to activate a build. When I click on an environment, there's a dropdown menu which shows the various builds for the associated environment.

The fact that there is an "Active" and "Available" label next to each build suggests to the user that there's a way to activate a build for an environment by choosing a build from the dropdown. The actual way to activate a build is to click the edit button on the other side of the page:

and this will reveal a hidden "Change environment version" button next to the dropdown. You can now select a new build and click the button to activate a build:

This might sound ridiculous to an experienced user but I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out if choosing a different item from this dropdown would activate the build. I couldn't tell if the conda-store-server was just taking a while to activate a build, or whether the UI was glitching out and not updating the Active/Available annotations next to each build in the dropdown menu, or whether it was something else. I spent a bunch of time watching the terminal running the conda-store-server before I realized there was just no API call being made that could be setting the active build (though there are a bunch of API calls made to get the list of installed packages when you change the dropdown selection).

I think revealing the hidden "Change environment version" button is harder to find than one might expect because

The dropdown suggests a way to change the build that isn't quite what you need to do.
When I think of editing an environment, I think of changing the packages in the environment, so I didn't immediately click on the Edit button. The Edit button is also very very visually separated from the rest of the environment management controls, making it harder to associate with those other controls as a new user.

As a last piece of feedback - if we are going to have a button to set the active version of an environment, IMO it should use the terminology we have already established for this, i.e. it should say something like "Change active build" or similar.

conda-incubator / conda-store-ui