Dropdowns in the list of assets are unforgiving of mouse leaving

[magicznyleszek]

Description

As you know we have lists of Assets Rows that on mouse over display Action Buttons. One of them is actually a Dropdown opener. The opened Dropdown is a part of the Action Buttons, so when you move mouse out of the area (the red area from the screenshot below) the Dropdown disappears, because the Action Buttons disappear. This is annoying when you want to move mouse to scroll list of assets - basically bad UX 👎

Proposition

I could make Action Buttons show up on mose enter and make them disappear after half second - this will give the user some time to take the mouse pointer back to the area to stop Dropdown from disappearing. Downside is that now user will need to wait for the Dropdown to close before they could open the Dropdown from the Asset Row below current one.

[Ig-Rebollo]

I've been thinking about this for a while and I see several problems with both options. Ultimately the problem is that buttons that appear/disappear on hover should be quick actions, but never drop downs with more stuff in them. This creates actions within actions, which is always clunky for users. If you take the example of Gmail for instance, where they have similar buttons on hover, they only provide a few quick actions, and even those are just a duplication of what you get on the top of the table. The solution you are proposing @magicznyleszek is a quick fix, but would yield other annoyances (such as having to wait for the window to disappear).

We could start doing that as an immediate action to start addressing the problem, but I would suggest 2 fixes, one in the short term and another one (the ideal one) for the long term:

Short term fix: Make the dropdown a pop-up window. This window would cover the other buttons and replace the three dots icon for an 'X'. The window would stay open until you either click on the 'X' or click outside of the pop-up window.

Long term solution: Create a navigation bar on top of the table that allows you to do bulk actions. Things like 'move' or 'download' can have drop downs to give you more options (i.e. file type), while others would remain the same. This would also mean each row would have to include a checkbox to select that row. Only specific actions that can't (or shouldn't) be done in bulk, such as 'edit' or 'replace form' would remain in the row appearing on hover.

What do you think @magicznyleszek ?

cc'ing @tinok as this was also mentioned during the NLP functionality discussions.

[magicznyleszek]

IMO the pop up window sounds ok for a short term fix. It would be much more pleasant experience to use, and wouldn't be hard to adapt to. I'm voting yes 👍