Snapping Candidates causing usability issues

[Jivix]

Some people are making bug posts about the new Snapping Candidates feature. It's very unintuitive at first, especially due to the ways candidates are chosen.

The feature describes the process of assigning candidates as "Creating a new object, or hovering over an existing object, designates it as a snapping candidate". It turns out that you can also create candidates when deselecting elements (doesn't matter how you deselect, they always become a candidate).

I initially thought I was not able to assign a candidate by hovering, only selecting. It turns out this is because there is a fairly lengthy delay (which I don't see any way to configure). The hovering method can produce very unexpected results in documents with overlapping frames - sometimes it appears that the top frame is chosen, other times it is the lower frame.

This is also a problem when using the selection method, because if you click the wrong element there is no way to prevent it from becoming a candidate, short of closing the document (I was hoping pressing escape to deselect would prevent this from happening), meaning you get to click 7 things to get back to the same set of candidates you had previously, plus the correct selection. This can be very tedious. As long as this is part of the candidate selection process, there really needs to be a way to back out of a selection, because I am constantly selecting and rearranging elements and it is extremely difficult to manage a "good" set of candidates. I would almost prefer a candidate toggle option on each and every element on a page.

Creating a new object means that one of your previous candidates is no longer a candidate. This can be a problem when you are trying to create a layout with lots of elements and you want the same set of candidates to snap all of them to.

 

I propose making each of these candidate selection methods optional, so users can gain more control over when and how candidates change, and preventing Escape deselection from creating a candidate from a selected element.

Edit: Also I am not sure the whole snapping candidate feature should be the default option, given how confusing it has been for some users who are exposed to it for the first time and accidentally reported the feature as a bug, the other options are a lot more intuitive.

[walt.farrell]

We've always had Snapping Candidates.

What's new that is confusing people? (I know they are confused, just not sure why, suddenly.)

[Jivix]

I just noticed the feature in 1.9 for some reason (probably because I had to remove my settings while attempting to fix performance issues). There was also a new post made by staff regarding the issue which seemed to indicate this is an issue which has cropped up recently. Perhaps people are reporting it because the magenta frames are more visible than they had been?

[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, Jivix said:

I just noticed the feature in 1.9 for some reason (probably because I had to remove my settings while attempting to fix performance issues). There was also a new post made by staff regarding the issue which seemed to indicate this is an issue which has cropped up recently. Perhaps people are reporting it because the magenta frames are more visible than they had been?

I think that @Sean P made that post simply because so many people were mentioning it. But I don't think anything has actually changed. Perhaps he'll comment on that for us