topic Floating input drag handle too fiddly in Fusion Support Forum

Floating input drag handle too fiddly

Scoox — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 11:59:00 GMT

The floating input box handle, depicted below, doesn't has a number of issues:

1. Hard to grab: The handle is made up of a number of staggered tiny dots. You have to actually click on one of the dots in order to grab the handle, otherwise the click goes through. Therefore about 50% of clicks that are aimed at the handle go through and select whatever is behind, I doubt this is intentional.

2. Hard to see: Look at the previous screenshot, the handle is practically impossible to see against the default light gray background.

3. The gap: There is an unnecessary gap between the handle and the input box. Clicking in the gap targets whatever is in the background, not the input box:

In my opinion something like this might be better:

To me this looks cleaner, there is no gap, the extent of the handle area is clearly visible and contrasts well against the default light-gray background. Clicking anywhere within the handle area (dark gray) targets the input box, i.e. no click-through like currently. Fusion 360 should adjust the color of the handle according to the "theme" chosen, to ensure good contrast.

One more thing. At the moment, clicking anywhere in the light gray border opens the value presets drop-down. This is counter-intuitive since there is a down-arrow icon to the right of the input box, which sort of implies "here's were you should click to expand the drop-down". I don't have a huge problem with the this, although in my opinion it would be better to allow dragging the box by any area of the border, just my opinion. For example, in the following mock-up, the input box could be dragged by the blue area, and the drop-down would be expanded by clicking the red area:

Thanks and happy new year!

Re: Floating input drag handle too fiddly

Scoox — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 15:09:38 GMT

Bad editing... My post was meant to read "The floating input box handle, depicted below, ~~doesn't~~ has a number of issues:"

Re: Floating input drag handle too fiddly

TrippyLighting — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 15:14:11 GMT

I've been following your many suggestions of how to improve the UI and they've really gotten my attention. They are well thought out and presented.

In one word Excellent!

@brianrepp It might not be a bad idea to collect these and have your UI team evaluate them.

Re: Floating input drag handle too fiddly

brianrepp — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 19:15:53 GMT

Thanks for the heads up, Peter!

@Scoox when we’re back in the office next week I’ll talk to our UX team.

Happy New Years everyone!

Re: Floating input drag handle too fiddly

Scoox — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 19:40:54 GMT

Thanks Peter and Brian, and best wishes for 2018!

Re: Floating input drag handle too fiddly

jeff_strater — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:13:04 GMT

Thanks for bringing this up, @Scoox. It turns out that the problem here was that this handle has some areas that are transparent, so the selection flows through to the stuff behind it. So, there are only really a few dots that you can use to drag this thing. I showed this to the UI team, and they were able to fix it by getting rid of those transparent areas. It has been fixed in our local build, and should appear in the next major update of Fusion.

Jeff