A usability issue in Zotero's two-panel interface

anark

I would like to raise a usability issue in Zotero's two-panel interface.

The databased items in the left-hand panel are listed with backgrounds that alternate between white and light grey. When I select any one of the items to pop open the full record in the right-hand panel, the background colour of the selected item in the left-hand panel changes to orange, which is very noticeable and indicates unmistakeably whereabouts in the listing I am, which is very serviceable.

Zotero doesn't work like this when I save an item from an online source. In this case, Zotero will pop open the right-hand panel with the respective item's relevant form fields, but when I try to move from there to the left-hand panel, I often find the experience very frustrating because I don't immediately find the item. The item is in fact 'highlighted' in a slightly different light grey -- (#E5E3E1 rather than the regular #EEEEEE that alternates with white -- but the visual difference between these two shades of grey is negligible and often occasions me to strain hard to figure out where the item sits in the listing.

This problem wouldn't exist if the selected item could have an orange background as well, or anything else that would make the selected item stand out visually, instead of relying on the barely noticeable difference between two shades of grey...

Thanks!

adamsmith

seeing that too and agree. I'd say there's so little reason for this that it might as well be called a bug.
(that's on ubuntu linux in my case)

anark

I'm using Ubuntu as well -- the orange may come from Ubuntu's orange and purple brand identity,[PDF] so colours may vary elsewhere.

dstillman

(First, when you say "left-hand pane", I assume you actually mean the center pane — i.e., the items list — not the actual left-hand pane, which has libraries and collections.)

This isn't really a bug. The issue is just that, while a newly saved item is always given focus, the selected pane isn't changed. So if the collections pane is selected, the new, focused item has its non-active highlighting (generally some shade of gray). If you simply click an item in the middle pane before saving — in other words, if you select the middle pane — then the new, focused item will have active (in your case orange) highlighting.

We can debate whether the middle pane should be given focus when an item is saved, but the current behavior isn't incorrect.

adamsmith

anark is using a two panel view I think (see thread title), hence "left panel" for them.
OK, I see, so no bug -- what would be the disadvantage of activating the center panel when saving an item?

dstillman

anark is using a two panel view I think (see thread title), hence "left panel" for them

Ah, sorry, missed that.

The issue is actually a little more complicated than I describe above, because if the webpage has focus (as it would if you're browsing normally), the middle pane in Zotero doesn't. So to avoid this you actually have to click on the middle pane in Zotero immediately before clicking the Save to Zotero button.

The problem is that I'm not sure stealing focus from the webpage and focusing Zotero every time you save to Zotero is actually a good idea, because it means you can't continue to navigate the webpage (e.g., arrow key scrolling) with the keyboard.

Note that, if you can't find the non-active highlighted item in the middle pane (it's pretty clear on OS X), you can just click the search box and hit Tab once (in two-pane mode, or a few times in three-pane mode) to focus the middle pane, which will give the item active highlighting.

dstillman

Alternative method, in either pane mode: click any field in the right-hand pane (e.g., Title) and hit Escape. Focus will be returned to the items list.

anark

Thanks, Dan, and yes, this is about the middle and the right-hand panel.

I repeatedly get stopped dead in my tracks when I switch my attention from the active right-hand panel to the respective item in the middle panel, which is a switch required in a number of perfectly legitimate scenarios other than saving a new item: say I have just edited a previously incorrect form field in the right-hand panel and I want to enter the middle panel to export that item, or to see what similar items I've got, etc.

I'm not sure two panels should be given focus concurrently. To me, the culprit seems to be what you call 'non-active highlighting'. As mentioned earlier, in my particular version of Zotero the difference between non-active highlighting and the shade of grey that regularly alternates with white is the difference between #E5E3E1 and #EEEEEE.

This difference is minuscule.

If an item happens to have a white background when it isn't highlit, then the light grey non-active highlight falls between two lines of slightly lighter grey, and the item can fairly easily be spotted by the clump of grey thereby created.

If, by contrast, the non-active highlight highlights an item whose non-highlit background is light grey to begin with, then there isn't much highlighting to be had out of the non-active highlight colour: it blends in almost perfectly with the pattern in which lines of white and light grey alternate.

So the best solution might simply be to make the non-active highlight colour more distinct from one of the two alternating background colours.

anark

The escape key does the trick, thanks!

(I still believe there's an interface design issue, though, at least in my particular version.)

dstillman

I repeatedly get stopped dead in my tracks when I switch my attention from the active right-hand panel to the respective item in the middle panel, which is a switch required in a number of perfectly legitimate scenarios other than saving a new item: say I have just edited a previously incorrect form field in the right-hand panel and I want to enter the middle panel to export that item, or to see what similar items I've got, etc.

I think you might be confused here. Any time the right-hand pane loses focus — by either saving changes with Return or cancelling them with Escape — focus should be returned to the middle pane, resulting in (in your case) the orange highlight. Try it.

I'm not sure two panels should be given focus concurrently.

I don't know what this is referring to — that's not what I suggested (nor is it technically possible). I'm saying that taking focus from the webpage page and giving it to the items pane every time a Zotero item is saved — which would be one way of addressing the issue, corresponding to what you describe in your initial post about manually focusing an item in the middle pane — doesn't strike me as necessarily desirable.

As for the unfocused highlight color, we're currently just using Mozilla defaults here. On OS X, Mozilla itself uses different background/selection colors that are more distinct in its most prominent use of the tree, in the bookmarks manager (a.k.a. Places), but even in the default tree style that Zotero uses, the two grays are pretty distinct. On Linux, the colors are indeed quite close — you can actually see the same problem in Places, which uses the defaults. In the 4.0 Beta, I've changed the unfocused, selected row color on Linux to the same gray that's used on OS X. That's not necessarily the best color for the Linux color scheme (and someone is welcome to suggest a better one), but it does the job of distinguishing it from the alternating-row color.

adamsmith

In the 4.0 Beta, I've changed the unfocused, selected row color on Linux to the same gray that's used on OS X. That's not necessarily the best color for the Linux color scheme (and someone is welcome to suggest a better one), but it does the job of distinguishing it from the alternating-row color.

thanks Dan, that's great.

anark

As mentioned above, the escape key does the trick, which solves the issue to all practical and immediately relevant intents and purposes.

I don't have a problem with panel focus, and I'm looking forward to a more distinctive unfocused-selected row colour in Zotero 4.0.

Thanks!