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rust-lang / mdBook

Create book from markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust
https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/
Mozilla Public License 2.0
17.75k stars 1.61k forks source link

Page left/right buttons take up too much space on desktop layout #280

Open cogwheel opened 7 years ago

cogwheel commented 7 years ago

The page left/right buttons take up the entire vertical height of the page and are about 5 times as wide as the < and > icons.

While reading the rust book and switching between windows, I constantly find myself navigating to new pages when I think i'm just clicking in blank space. They should only respond to clicks in the region near the icon.

azerupi commented 7 years ago

I checked and unless it has a different behaviour on your desktop, it is the desired behaviour. They do indeed take the whole vertical space outside of the content but that is on purpose because it is easier to click. If you look at Gitbook, it does exactly the same thing.

I'm not sure I would consider this a bug, but if a lot of people feel the same way as you, I can definitely reconsider.

cogwheel commented 7 years ago

It makes sense for a touch interface; i could see this being handy on a tablet or e-reader where it's the only thing on a screen, but it definitely violates expectations of a desktop UI. If hitting "back" reliably brought me to the same scroll position on the page I was just on it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

aoikonomopoulos commented 6 years ago

Having found myself randomly warped to the previous/next chapter quite a few times while reading the rustc guide, I would like to add 2 (different) cents here.

I would argue that wanting to jump to the beginning of the next chapter (let alone the beginning of the previous one) is not a common use case when the user is halfway through a page/chapter. How about having large, touch-friendly, buttons at beginning/end of a page and then relying on the side bar for letting the user jump around?

Also, I'm not a usability expert, so grain of salt and all, but: it appears to me that the perceived utility of the endless buttons needs to be weighed against some downsides. Namely, it is completely invisible that the area is active, to the point that I felt as if I was dealing with a prank, where someone had just booby-trapped /apparently inactive/ areas of the page to warp to an unrelated destination. I understood the intentions behind the design but, in my case, the design went against the expectations that have been built up by any number of other web pages.

Still coming from my non-usability-expert experience, I imagine this must also be a disservice towards people who use auto-click software and therefore need to have dead areas to park their pointer on.

Which is not to say that the phone/tablet use case is less important, simply that I think the device can service mobile users without inconveniencing desktop ones (as per the suggestion above).

Hope this helps and thanks for this great tool!