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TS6:CCP: navigation?

Adam Stoller

Why is it in CCP that you can navigate through archives and branches - but when you click on Workareas you have to switch to another part of the UI in order to select which workarea you want to navigate into?

I realize that once you've selected a workarea, the left-hand navigation changes to be rooted within that workarea - but it seems a bit awkward to not be able to select the workarea from within the navigation portion of the window.

I haven't gotten my hands on 6.1 yet - has this been "fixed"? If not, is there a rationale behind this UI decision?

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

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Migrateduser

We noticed the same thing when we started using 6.0. It's an awkward UI. Doesn't make any sense.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Johnny

It's the same in 6.1

I find it a little annoying aswell.

Those who live in one workarea would be fine, but people using CCP normally jump across areas

John Cuiuli

gzevin

yep.. just looked it up in 6.1.. it's the same.. I mean annoying...

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU

abackenr

the reason for this design is consistency and performance.

there are two considerations:
1) we want the tree (in the left hand side) to behave as much as possible (meaning exactly) like a folder tree in an explorer type interface. meaning, absolutely no shortcuts or abbreviation of the contents of the nodes. if you notice, in webdeskpro, the tree plays a lot of games in order to limit the amount of information displayed at any one time.
2) branches tend to have a lot (where a lot in this case is defined as >1000) of editions. editions are areas. so are workareas and staging. while in the list (on the right side) we can play games with pagination, in the tree, we do not do that. hence, in the interest of performance, we (meaning i) decided to treat areas as leaf nodes in the branch navigation context. so why not show workareas and staging in the tree, and just don't show editions you ask? refer to consideration 1, consistency. if we treat areas as container nodes anywhere, we need to treat them as containers everywhere. so instead we treat areas as leafs everywhere. you get less in your tree, it's faster, and it's predictable.

so, what i can tell you, is that this wasn't an easy decision and it's still contentious (i get gripes about this from people regularly). and my only consolation is that at least you aren't staring at the screen wondering why it's taking for ever to expand the EDITION node in the tree, and wondering why cpu is peaking on your machine making it inoperable.

wait, i have more consolation! if you are working in multiple workareas, use favorites to store your workareas. that, or use my workareas (in 6.1 you now have an option to show only workareas you own in my workareas, which makes the resulting list lot more manageable).

nipper

abackenr, thanks for the thoughful reply. If only more IW people would post like that. We may not all
agree with your decision (which from what you say is not uncommon) but I think we all have a better
understanding of why you made that decision.

Unless of course, you reall do not work for Interwoven (from one of my favorite cartoons: on the Internet no
one really knows you are a Dog

)

Which brings me tp my next point, please fill out your profile and possibly add a signature. Your points
will carry much more weight, unless you are in Marketing & I understand keeping that quiet.

Anydy

Adam Stoller

Thanks for the response.

I'm not sure I completely agree with the rationale, but I can understand it.

I guess I think of workareas more as transitional-nodes rather than as leaf-nodes, such that I would expect to see a list of workareas within the left-hand navigation window if I expanded the "Workareas" node, but that if I were to "enter" any of those workareas I would transition into a workarea-relative navigational mode.
I don't think you'd pay the price for displaying all the workareas (or editons) until/unless you expanded it.

Or .. let's even go a step further in the direction you took - why bother showing "Editions" or "Workareas" within the left-hand navigation at all - "STAGING" only shows up within the main window (along with "Editons" and "Workareas") when you click on the branch name in the left-hand navigation window - why not consider the branch name itself as being the dividing point between what shows up within the left-hand navigation and the main-window navigation areas?

I think that would feel more consistant and reasonable to me from a UI perspective.
The left-hand navigation is to traverse through either [high-level mode] archives and branches / sub-branches or [low-level mode] directories / sub-directories.
The main-window navigation allows traversal [without showing a context tree] through branches / sub-branches, Editions, Workareas, STAGING, directories / sub-directories, and finally files.

I think that would probably keep the left-hand navigation zippy for performance but also provide a cleaner / clearer distinction between what shows up where.

If you stick with the existing split - then I would argue that STAGING should be put back into the left-hand navigation tree - despite the fact that it kind of breaks the split you're presenting.

Oh well, something to think about anyway.

Thanks again for the response.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

abackenr

more explanations inline:

> fish wrote:

> I'm not sure I completely agree with the rationale, but I can understand it.

so you think you're entitled to your own opinion? i hate it when people think that...

> I don't think you'd pay the price for displaying all the workareas (or editons) until/unless you expanded it.

true. but if a user were to expand an EDITION node with a lot of editions it would create quite a strain both on the server and on the client. in the tree, we do not have the luxury of pagination. in the list we do (we show only 100 nodes at a time by default). and basically, it is just too common of a scenario to have branches with thousands of editions.

> Or .. let's even go a step further in the direction you took - why bother showing "Editions" or "Workareas"
> within the left-hand navigation at all - "STAGING" only shows up within the main window (along with "Editons"
> and "Workareas") when you click on the branch name in the left-hand navigation window - why not consider
> the branch name itself as being the dividing point between what shows up within the left-hand navigation and
> the main-window navigation areas?

so not you're getting to the real contensious point. why isn't STAGING on the left? why are the placeholders there at all?

first, let me reiterate the distinction. EDITION and WORKAREA are containers of area (often referred to as placeholders). STAGING is an area. thus to make it clear, STAGING is very different from WORKAREA and EDITION.

so the initial implementation (before we shipped 6.0) didn't have WORKAREA and EDITION in the tree. this was inconsistent, as WORKAREA and EDITION are clearly container nodes. so WORKAREA and EDITION were put in the tree. this is consistent in that it allows you to naviagte to any leaf node, without using the list.

so why isn't STAGING in the tree? because it is an area, and structurally equivalent to a workarea or edition. so since workareas and editions aren't in the tree, neither is staging. this has the added consistent behavior that you only chroot when you click on an area in the list (meaning your tree doesn't all of a sudden get rooted to an area when you click on a node in the tree).

> I think that would probably keep the left-hand navigation zippy for performance but also provide a cleaner / clearer distinction between what shows up where.

so i hope that with my explanation of area vs. placeholder you'll agree that the split between what is in the tree and what isn't is consistent.

as far as updating my profile goes, i have no idea where to go to do that. i'll dig around and see if i can find it.

nipper

Thanks for you very insightful posts. Please post again.

>as far as updating my profile goes, i have no idea where to go to do that. i'll dig around and see if i can find it.

top dead center of your page, Control Panel

Andy

Migrateduser

I agree. Those were excellent explanations. I wish every "questionable" decision was explained so thoroughly.

Thanks,

Jason

Adam Stoller

Opinions are like ... everyone has one ;-)

That was a very thorough and clear explanation - and I cannot find fault with the logic behind it.
It will take a bit of getting used to - but it makes it easier to understand and also to explain to my customers if they have the same questions I did.

Thanks much,

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com