Please improve panel visual depth management

[A_B_C]

While you are at improving the UX by turning the Typography dialog into a panel (thank you very much for that, it is highly appreciated), would you mind reconsidering the overall panels layout too?

I still find that the current approach to draw panel sections is not very apt to visually keep things together that belong together, especially in the typography-related panels that have a lot of sections. The z-dimension (depth) management is not really compelling. Visually, the section headers are one level deeper than the panel surface, which creates a hierarchy problem that has been present from version 1.0.

A section heading should never sit inside a groove, for when you do it this way, you cannot create the impression that the heading starts a section whose contents will be subsumed under the heading. If you need a section inside a panel, there are much better, time-proven ways to do this.

To take a (really just random) example, here is a panel stack from Blender. I hope you can see that the visual depth management that is much clearer than Affinity’s. While it may not be perfect in any respect, it is clear at first glance what contents belong to the sections “Restrictions”, “Instancing”, “Line Art”, and “Custom Properties” respectively:

Now confer this example to your visual depth management in the following example. Can you tell at first glance that “Justification” opens a new section? Or doesn’t it rather seem that the bar in which the section heading lives is the footer of the dark area for tabulator settings above? Especially when the scroll bar is present on the right?

I hope you can see that there is room for improvement in this area. I know it’s not likely that you will overhaul your entire panel layout on occasion of reorganising the Typography panel, but maybe this change is a good occasion to take a step back and make notes for further improvements in future versions. So I just wanted to mention the problem here (again).

[A_B_C]

A modest suggestion that would improve UX in the present framework: please add Collapse-all and Expand-all by Alt-clicking the section headers inside a panel.

This would at least provide a workaround for many orientation problems in crowded panels and reduce search time.

[GarryP]

1 hour ago, A_B_C said:

please add Collapse-all and Expand-all by Alt-clicking the section headers inside a panel.

You can double-click a Panel name in a Panel Group to minimize the Group and then click on a Panel name to view the group again.

You can also double-click the Panel name of a floating Panel to minimize the Panel and then click on the name again to view the Panel again.

See attached video.

If that’s not what you want then more detail might be required.

[fde101]

@GarryP that is not what @A_B_C is asking for - I understood the request quite clearly, and it is an obvious thing to have in place, which I definitely believe should have been there from the beginning.

The request is not to open or close the entire panel, but the individual sections within the panel, all at once.

In other words, clicking the triangle to collapse or expand "Ligatures", "Figure Position", "Capitals", etc. - but instead of just one of them, when a modifier is held down, collapse or expand all of them at the same time.

The idea is that if they are all expanded, you could collapse all of them at once, then expand individually the one you are interested in, without having to go hunt through the expanded sections that might have the one you are looking for scrolled out of view.

[GarryP]

Ah, I see, thanks for clarifying.
Sounds good to me.

[A_B_C]

@fde101, I couldn’t have explained my suggestion any better … 😀

[A_B_C]

It’s interesting that there already is a Blender-like solution (confer my screenshot above) for the new Typography Panel, as shown in Ash’s announcement.

 

So the UI framework basically seems to allow transferring a rendering logic for sections from dialogs to panels. Remember that the above rendering of panel sections in the new Typography Panel is essentially the same as it is in the current dialog (and also the same as it is in the current Preferences Dialog), so I wonder whether this new approach could be transferred to all other panels.