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Maniphest T252530

An overflowing help panel/guidance can block a fluid editing experience on desktop
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Description

On desktop, the help panel is located above the text, overflowing it. This means that you can't have the help panel and all the text displayed at the same time. It can be an issue when you want to work on suggested edits, using guidance and keep the guidance at reach while editing.

This task is to keep in mind this possible issue, knowing that

  • not everyone has a large screen,
  • the left bar is not used while editing
  • mobile help panel is displayed full size

Illustrations:

Can't edit and read the help panel content (current state)Can edit and read both at the same time
Capture d’écran_2020-05-12_14-27-41.png (887×1 px, 273 KB)
Capture d’écran_2020-05-12_14-28-39.png (928×1 px, 476 KB)

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Event Timeline

Trizek-WMF created this task.May 12 2020, 12:37 PM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptMay 12 2020, 12:37 PM
RHo added a comment.May 12 2020, 1:15 PM

Thanks @Trizek-WMF for taking time to file this task. It sounds like you are saying that this will be an issue for Desktop users without a wide enough screen who want to use guidance and edit at the same time on Desktop and they need to edit something that is behind the panel?

If so, I think I should clarify that the intention/expectation is actually that users know to minimize the help panel if and when this occurs, much in the same way that mobile users do so when the panel appears as a fullscreen overlay on mobile. Perhaps we can re-contextualize this task as being about giving more affordance to the minimize-ability of the panel, and also exploring a design enhancement to make it a moveable component so that users can move it to where convenient when editing. We should revisit T211513: Help panel: show search link content and help link content inside help panel when doing so as enabling help search results content to be shown inside the help panel would make it much more useful.

Note also that the reason for the default placement of the help on Desktop to be in the bottom right was based on finding this to be the common position of similar help content in design research, so would envision this to be maintained as the default starting location.

Trizek-WMF added a comment.May 12 2020, 3:58 PM

Yes, editing behind the panel may be complicated. you have to read the action to make, minimize the panel, make the action, maximize the panel, check you edit that is (of course) behind the panel, etc. A bit frustrating, right?

People with a large enough screen may appreciate to have the help panel not being hovering the content they edit. Overall, provide a way to have the guidance always being visible with access to the content would be a nice to have. This is something you designed in structured tasks wireframes. We could imagine to split the screen, with the top part being for editing and the lower part being for guidance, with a possibility to select which proportion of the screen is used by both. Maybe the help panel should become a help footer?

Have it a moveable component would indeed help. We already discussed about it IIRC. I checked for a Phab task about it but I didn't find any.

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