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sagemathinc / cocalc

CoCalc: Collaborative Calculation in the Cloud
https://CoCalc.com
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Notebook server buttons are quite confusing #7688

Open novoselt opened 3 months ago

novoselt commented 3 months ago

These ones at the top: image

Evidence: during a meeting one expert clicked "JupyterLab..." repeatedly, probably with an expectation that something will happen. At the very least I thought that something will happen and, knowing that it may take time to start the server, I thought that there has to be some indication that the server is starting. Eventually the server was started using a lower button.

Now I have tried to repeat the process, I clicked "JupyterLab..." and started counting. After a minute I decided this cannot take that long. Then I have finally realized that this button opened an info panel and I have to click another button. So my claim is that this is not at all obvious. Especially on small screens where the opened panel may not even be visible!!!

If this buttons have to be so big, I would much rather have them arranged vertically on the left with button-dependent explanation on the right, always visible. Instructions about popups can be on the top then. Clicking on a button should actually launch the corresponding server.

An overall problem is that these buttons are so easily accessible in multiple ways, yet a bunch of users who specifically want "everything to be like JupyterLab" have not discovered them. No suggestions on this point...

williamstein commented 3 months ago

I think we can just get rid of the 2-state buttons at this point and switch to an explanatory pop-up modal, like with compute servers, where there is a modal that pops up while the app is launching. When we wrote those buttons you're talking about, it was before Antd, and we didn't have a good way of showing modals in cocalc at all. Now we have great support for them.