Making circle changes from the hover menu should be less easy

[sincere]

Title:
Making circle changes from the hover menu should be less easy

Area:
entries

Summary:
It is currently too easy to accidentally make circle changes through the hover menu, accidental or otherwise. I propose changing the current <i>two</i> links that require no confirmation before acting to <i>one</i> link that will redirect to the Add to Circle or Manage Subscription page with full text options.

Description:
Several times in the last two weeks alone my mouse has passed, either purposefully or accidentally on the way to clicking something else, over someone's usericon. The hover menu doesn't open until the instant I am attempting to click somewhere else, and now I have clicked on one of the many links in the hover menu. <i>Immediately</i> I have subscribed to someone's journal, unsubscribed from someone's journal, granted someone access to my personal entries, or removed someone's existing access to my personal entries. This simple misclick can result in as many as two email notifications to let someone know that I changed their status -- when I had no intention of doing anything like that.

It's embarrassing to accidentally grant access to someone you're just talking to casually on a community, and even more embarrassing to then go "Uh, sorry, never mind" and take it away again.

I don't see why the hover menu makes this so easy. This requires only a single click and it's just done, but when I do it on the profile page, where I am <i>much</i> less likely to click on those links accidentally, it takes me to a separate page going "Are you sure?" first.

In addition, the hover menu has a lot of text on it, and it appears and disappears very quickly. Once I misclick, I usually have to hover over the icon again 3-4 times to see what I changed, and then to get my mouse to the link to change back again.

My solution to these problems: Replace the "Subscribe/Unsubscribe" and "Grant access/Remove access" links with just one link, which will redirect users to the existing Add to Circle or Manage Subscription pages (depending on their current status in your circle). This both removes the accidental adding problem, and makes it easier to use.


<b>Potential pros:</b>
+ No more accidental circle changes. Big pro for me.
+ Fewer links means less chance for misclicking in general.
+ Users won't have to sort through as much text to find the link they want.
+ Seems more accessible for readers who have reading or clicking difficulty than providing so many options on the tiny, there-and-gone-again hover menu.


<b>Potential cons:</b>
+ Some ease of use removed, requiring an extra page load to change circle status.
+ If there is any accessibility reason for the pile of links and text on the hover menu, that should be taken into account.
+ If you were hoping to meet your future spouse via a misclick granting them access and them falling in love with you while reading your private meanderings, this may reduce the odds of that happening.

Poll #9258 Making circle changes from the hover menu should be less easy

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 69

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
9 (13.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
16 (23.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
23 (33.3%)

(I have no opinion)
18 (26.1%)

(Other: please comment)
3 (4.3%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

I agree that it is too easy to have clicking accidents (my touchpad sometimes isn't the most precise either), but I think leaving the two links but then have a pop-up confirmation dialog would be enough.

[dingsi]

+1

[faere]

+1

[ursamajor]

Agreed; this seems like a decent compromise rather than having to load a separate page that might cause you to lose work from your current page.

[kerravonsen]

+1

[larissa]

+1

[sincere]

I always intended to suggest a pop-up confirmation (the way you get one when you try to delete a comment) as an alternative: that was my original suggestion, before a friend convinced me this way was better. She told me to do so in the comments, and this post was approved when I was asleep.

However, for the record, these are the reasons I chose the suggestion that I did instead of that:

1) If there is only one link and the message is as simple as "Change Circle Status", it isn't hard to figure out that clicking on it will take you to another page; at most you'll make that mistake once. You can easily open the link in another tab or wait until you're done with your reading before clicking through, so there's no interruption. Several links on the hover-menu will take you to an additional page, so a misclick there can already take you off your reading page.

2) The hover-menu is up for a very short period of time, and having less text on it would make it easier for people to use it. Two different links = more text, more things to click, more precision to operate, less friendly.

3) My friend suggested that implementing the pop-up would be difficult and unreliable. Some people would get it, and some wouldn't. The pop-ups don't appear reliably in her experience, and only for people who have Javascript enabled. People without Javascript would get redirected to another page, meaning there has to be two different implementations.

That is why I chose the suggestion that I did. It's true that just requiring confirmation for the existing links would solve the problem, but the solution I ended up with felt like it would solve more problems without creating additional difficulty.

[opusculus]

For what it's worth, the hover subscribe/access already doesn't work if you have javascript disenabled. So the fact that the popup would have to rely on people having javascript enabled isn't really a problem, since the problem it's fixing also requires javascript to be enabled.

While I see your other two points, for me, the convenience of not having to leave the page to add or remove people outweighs them.

[sincere]

I didn't realize that about the hover menu! Thanks for pointing that out, that does fix a lot of what I was concerned about with a pop-up confirmation.

[ratcreature]

I don't get what you mean with "The hover-menu is up for a very short period of time". For me it stays up for as long as I hover, so there is no problem if I want to use it.

[marahmarie]

I dunno. fu modified it recently to speed it up (within the last month or two? It was listed in changelog). It went from where hovering on a user icon opened the menu and kept it open indefinitely as long as I didn't move my mouse too far away, to where hovering on a user icon keeps the menu open now for only two seconds without further action, such as a specific link hover (and I just timed it, and it's barely two seconds). But depending on how fast you move your mouse/where you hover to begin with, I guess your mileage may vary...

[ratcreature]

It doesn't behave like that for me at all. If I move my pointer over the little head, and then do nothing (no movement, no click etc) it stays open for me no matter how long I wait (well, I waited while I counted slowly from one to 60). So clearly my browser (I use the newest Firefox on Ubuntu Linux) behaves differently from your browser.

[marahmarie]

Well, when I get a minute (which might be days from now, but I won't forget) I'll find and link to fu's patch here, because as far as I know, I'm thinking what you're seeing is not the expected behavior, at least not anymore. I just hovered over some userheads (what you're talking about, the tiny little DW silk icons) and my own user icon (what I was talking about, the thing that usually says "Sheep go to heaven" up in the left corner there) and it's two seconds on both - unless I hover on the context menu itself, in which case the menu stays open indefinitely.

[ratcreature]

For me hovering over the icon gives the "username: icon keyword" information.

[montuos]

Dittos ratcreature: Firefox 9.0.1, Kubuntu 10.10, no timeout on hover menu for either icon or userhead; but unlike ratcreature they're the same menu for me.

[marahmarie]

My bad, maybe. I must have been dreaming that I saw fu said she sped up contextual menu hover times on user icons because I can't find any proof of it. I just browsed a few years worth of the Changelog archives and googled like mad but I only came up with three related changes, and of those, fixing z-indexing (positioning) on contextual hover comes the closest to what I thought she had posted, which is still quite far off.

All I know is the behavior when I hovered on user heads and icons used to be exactly the same as ratcreature's and yours until a while ago, then I saw something in Changelog about speeding it up (or I thought I did), then about a week later I started getting the two-second effect (across DW, not just on my own journal and community). I prefer the old behavior (what ratcreature and you are seeing) to the two-second timing; it's too fast now, especially when I'm coding, which involves a lot of right-clicking and viewing source on the very menus that keep flying off on me before I can do anything with them.

As to whether the speed is dependent on browser/OS, I don't know. I'm using Firefox 9 on XP, but the hover thing sped up for me many versions back on Firefox already (version 4 or 5, I think).

[montuos]

I'm not trying to say "your bad"; if you see that behavior, then you see that behavior. I just wanted to attest that what I see is the same behavior as ratcreature, and to document that I have a similar setup in case that's what makes the difference.

I too recall having seen something about work on the hover menu in the not-too-distant past, but I don't recall any of the details. :-/

[marahmarie]

I'm not trying to say "your bad";

Oh, I only meant "my bad" in the sense of "I don't have that link I said I'd fetch for ratcreature", but after almost literally reading parts of the last two years worth of Changelog (which was good, since with what I did find I can finally re-open the Lastpass/DW Support Request I closed last week for lack of the right info) while doing a month-by-month Archive search and doing some pretty involved Google searches, I don't, which makes me feel bad (and makes me think I look like I'm making this up when, in fact, I saw something, I just don't know exactly what, nor exactly when I last saw it).

[dhamphir]

+1 to the popup confirmation

[ariestess]

+1

[silverflight8]

Adding one more agreement to your suggestion. This is my "with changes" vote.

[nafs]

+1

[luciferous]

Yes. I love the one-click add from the hover menu currently, and vastly prefer using it to add people precisely because it's fast and easy and doesn't require me to load another page. So while I agree that misclicks are problematic, I'd be very much against changing the link in the hover menu to require me to go to another page. Having a popup confirmation seems like a good compromise.

[msilverstar]

+1

[runpunkrun]

+1

[kaberett]

I use the hover menu in preference to navigating via profile page because I really, really appreciate how much quicker and easier it is to do. On the other hand, I have things set up so I only get the menu on mouseover over the site little-person this-is-a-user icon, which is a smaller target & less likely for me to hit.

[azurelunatic]

The ease-of-action is important to me, but it looks like you are more inconvenienced than I am convenienced.

[kaberett]

For what it's worth, and sorry for not saying this explicitly above, the one-click add-on-hover massively reduces the number of spoons it takes for me to modify my circle.

[erik]

I really appreciate the current arrangement because it allows me to make those changes without interrupting the flow of what I am reading. For example:
I'm viewing my reading page and see a post from a friend that has comments. I click on over to read the comments and see that one of them is from a mutual friend I had not realized had an account.

The way things are now, I hover over them, click a couple of times, and keep reading.

Your way, I hover over them, click, end up on a different page with a lot of text and options, deal with that page, and now where was I...? Reading a friend's entry and comments (branched off of my reading page). I have to scroll back through my buffer, or start over on my reading page, find the entry again, and re-read a couple of the comments to regain the flow. MANY more clicks and a lot more processing.

[susanreads]

I wonder if it's possible to show different hover menus to different people, as an option? There's this, which I was going to say "Yes!" to, and then I read the comments, and it's not universally accessible anyway because it uses the mouse. And I'm sure there was something else where access needs clashed.

The thing I'm most likely to do with that menu is subscribe to a community, and I always forget that it doesn't send me to the page where I can pick a reading filter to add it to, so then I have to remember to do that later. I'd rather it went to a full-featured circle change page in another tab, but that's not accessible for people using mobiles with limited tab space. Options would get round that, but: option bloat.

[arethinn]

A confirmation might be a useful improvement (so that'd be my "with changes"), but the whole point of the hover menu is to make it easy to do those things without having to go to another place.

[montuos]

Goodness knows I'm clumsy enough with my own clicks, and I have periods of browser sluggishness too, but the beauty of the hover menu is that you can take care of your business immediately, right there on the spot, and I deeply appreciate that functionality.

It seems to me that it would actually be more to the point for those who don't like the one-click actions to (be able to?*) disable the hover menu than to change what it does. If you are prepared to go through a series of clicks and page loads to edit access, subscriptions, and so on to make sure that's really what you meant to do, it's simple enough (if lengthier) to click on the userhead and do it via the links on the profile page.


* I don't know whether this action is currently available or not other than by disabling java; if it's not, then I suppose I'm suggesting adding it as a choice for "Other" rather than simply voting "No".

[denise]

You can turn off the hover menu in the Display tab of Account Settings: http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display .

[marahmarie]

For what it's worth, you could try some CSS to hide the links in the meantime. You could just add this to your CSS:

.AddTrust, .AddWatch, .SetBan {display:none;}

That would remove the links from the hover menu on your journal and on other journals and communities that display in your style (with caveats that it might not look that nice and/or might confuse DW people who view your journal in your style, so using it or not is very much a personal thing).

[denise]

You can turn off the hover menu in the Display tab of Account Settings: http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display . There's no need to muck about with CSS to disable links.

[marahmarie]

This is true. But I was thinking this person might want to keep the hover links for PMs and the Profile page enabled.

[alexbayleaf]

No thanks. I like having that easy option there, without having to go off-page. Wouldn't love, but wouldn't vocally object to a more visible popup confirmation, though.