I wanted to share some mockups for operation history - would love to hear initial reactions from the community.
I've split the mockups into two options, and then two subcategories within each option. The central design question that emerged from research and sketching phases was whether we'd like to display buttons within individual entries themselves (option 1) or at the bottom of the history panel (option 2). Within each option, I experimented with two different ways of warning the user of potential impacts of a change they make in the operation history: either a) within the history tab itself or b) a pop-up dialogue listing the impacted operations.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, I hope seeing the sketches at a higher fidelity will be helpful.
And I should add: here is the color palette I created. I put it together based on the periwinkle color we have already (5C8CE6, the first one below) so that it would fit well with the overall existing design. Happy to hear any thoughts on this too!
I like Option 1 with icons close by. Then the choice of a dialog or colored bars…I like the colored bars but the first time it might not be recognizable enough and so a dismissible dialog might help twin with them until the user doesn’t need the reminder and dismisses dialog.
My worry here is that of a possibility of colored bars much further apart from a dependent operation. I think that can happen and then we’d need to somehow show the colored bars much further down and off the view. Visually collapsing the middle operations to bring the colored bars into view? This needs more thought on really long operations history with larger dependency gaps, then I could make a better decision.
Option 1 This is my preferred option as it requires less mouse travel on screen and allows users to gain a few seconds. I don't think it is either option A or B, as, for example, option 2B combines both. This allows the user to
Have a summary of the impact of the changes. This addresses Thad comment on what happens if the steps are further apart and are not all visible on the screen
Visually see which steps are impacted
Provide the legend on what each color means.
Option 2: I am unsure how you activate the bottom menu. Currently, selecting a step in the history reverts the project to that stage; is it a prerequisite to edit the step? In that case, the steps after 2 should be greyed out to indicate they are inactive.
Very nice! I also like @Martin's idea of using the same confirmation dialog currently present in 2B (with the colored highlights), but within the 1B proposal.
In design 1, I wonder if we're not missing some menu button ("hamburger", "three dots"…) in the menu entry, to get the contextual menu.
