UX meeting agenda 8 November 2016

[bgashler1]

• Discuss designs for managing contributed viewlets
• Review possible interaction flows and document next steps to iterate on

@isidorn did you want to discuss any of your previous items from #14851 (comment)

Meeting is the usual 8:00am Redmond time. Let me know if there is anything else that needs to be discussed.

[chrmarti]

@bgashler1 Is that interaction flows in general or specific to contributed viewlets?

[bgashler1]

@chrmarti it's specific to contributed viewlets

[bpasero]

My topics:

• Custom Mac title demo
• Hidden activity bar PR

[isidorn]

@bgashler1 I would like to discuss my previous topics if time permits

[bgashler1]

Meeting Notes

Artifacts

Here is the early (and rough) interactive prototype we discussed in the meeting today.

Possible interaction flows we discussed (we will modify based on feedback below)

Design Feedback

• Extensions contributing viewlets should be pinned upon opening from the view menu (no additional pinning action required). Maybe just have an unpin action on right click of extension (maybe apply this to other contributed parts of UI, like the status bar icons which allows you to restrict the contribution in that area—COMPLICATED). What if users only want part of the UI enabled from a contributed extension?
• It seems viewlets should only need to be enabled once to persist for all workspaces, as it would otherwise be tedious to re-enable them on an ad-hoc basis.
• We like the popup educating you on how to enable and giving you one action to enable/manage extensions right after installing them.

Ideas / Questions

• Permissions for extensions? Limit what they contribute (uncheck contributions in extensions)
• How do we overflow in the Activity Bar if people go crazy and install lot's of extensions? How do we reorder them? Should we allow reordering/disabling the core viewlets as well (some ask for this from users)? Should we address the problems of overflow and management in the status bar as well?

Next Steps:

• Managing order of viewlets: How do we make it discoverable that viewlets have been contributed after installing extensions (build on the popup Brad did)?
• How do you manage, hide, reorder them once they're there (see how WebStorm's does it for example)
• What do we do when the Activity Bar is hidden as far as being able to open viewlets (such as move stuff for managing viewlets in Status Bar?) We don't need to worry about removing activty bar (Steven concurs)
• Maybe we can make a command palette submenu or a simple keystroke for toggling through viewlets (or is this some new custom UI anchored to where the viewlet was, or temporarily show Activity Bar).