Menu hiding delay poll

Community
#1

Hello,

I heard the feedback at FOSDEM that our flyout menu opens quite often by mistake, since when people run to the left side of the table (e.g. for search or clicking a checkbox) they often go too far and active the menu. That opens and stays active for ~3 seconds even after the mouse moves out. That can be quite annoying. It was already discussed here Usabilty with main menu

I’ve tried to illustrate that on this gif too
menu_delay

The original motivation was so that the menu does not blink too much. However I think we should revisit this and figure out what our users think. That’s why I’m creating this poll. I’m going to keep it open for a month.

What is your menu delay after mouse out preference?

  • Keep the current delay
  • Shorten it to 1s
  • Drop the delay completely, hide on mouse out

0 voters

@MariaAga or @Ron_Lavi or anyone else who knows PF3, can you tell whether we could tweak the delay time easily? If so, could it be 0s? Could it be just 1s?

2 Likes
Foreman Community Demo #121
Usabilty with main menu
Lookback to the FOSDEM and cfgmgmt camp 2023
#2

Putting this poll in the context of my linked thread is kind of misleading.

Much more important is the delay between “mouse in” and “show menu”. That’s the annoying part. That it takes 3s to close the menu after that makes it even more annoying.

If there was a delay after which the menu shows, the delay to close it wouldn’t bother me that much…

And regarding the poll: IMHO no delay isn’t an option. It would mean that if I accidentally moved the mouse a little bit too far right the menu would be gone immediately. I don’t think that is user-friendly.

#3

I will check on a quick fix, but even if we will not do a quick fix on it, I had some discussions last week and will refactor the pf4 navigation soon

1 Like
#4

I’m torn between current and shorten to 1s. I certainly like some delay because I recall when we didn’t have it I had a hard time dealing with it. I just don’t know how 1s will feel when you use it.

Is there an easy way so I can change the time on my instance to play with?

#5

Checked, and with the old nav there is no way to change is as its hardcoded to 500ms. in the new pf4 nav we still didnt decide what user interactions will close the menu but we can control the timing

1 Like
#6

Personally I don’t know if any change of the delay would help (if this is possible to get shortened), the real issue is the focus breakage which happens by the automatic appearance of appearing fly-over nav-pane.
So really looking forward to what changes might come! :slight_smile:

#7

For me take the delay off, the menu stays open until you leave its area anyway. Every delay is just an assumption on what the user might want, which most of the time is incorrect.

#8

From other threads it looks like maybe the issue is also when does the menu opens which affects when users would prefer it would close.
I suggest to do a click on menu to open, click outside to close? (in the navigation refactor, not in the current menu)

#9

I’d be careful with a click to open. We had a long discussion about it in the past. Some previous discussions:

I will note that in some previous implementations the fold out part was not full height, so it was very easy to lose focus. And I can also say that back then a delay to fold out annoyed me. I can’t imagine a click will feel better.

This is likely one of those cases where you can never satisfy everyone with a common default.

#10

Oops, sorry I misread that thread. I thought the issue is the same and the proposal here is just a different solution to it. But having delay before the menu opens could also help. It seems we’re getting many suggestions and open comments here, which is great. I’ll add your suggestion to the same poll (you should be able to update the vote if that changes the answer).

EDIT: oh, I can’t change the poll anymore, let’s see where the discussion take us, I may open a new poll based on that.

is this the mouse in delay or mouse out delay? It feels longer (mouse out) than 500ms on my instance. If we can tweak it, is there a way to modify this from our stack without changing of pf3 module (and releasing a new version of it etc etc)? It may pretty much also be that we can’t do much without upgrade to pf4 (when ready).

#11

Pretty sure this is what hides it, and we cant change it in foreman and we probably cant update pf3.

The pf4 navigation pr is pretty ready as it is a “revive” of an old pr, will show it in the demo this week.

1 Like
#12

I’d be happy to consider this a “this is how we want it to work with PF4” discussion. PF3 is deprecated anyway and we should move forward.

2 Likes
#13

PF4 pr is up here:Fixes #30344 - use pf4 navigation by MariaAga · Pull Request #9659 · theforeman/foreman · GitHub and has a demo video for the 1s delay

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#14

Not sure if I like the sub menu being of limited length and having a scrollbar. As I tend to forget where some menu items are, I fear it will make me search even more.

Is this design decision caused by having potential to so many items that a scrollbar would be necessary anyway?

#15

The decision for the scroll is for a few reasons:

  • pf design is setting height to the sub menu (the default is 250px, I upped it to 350px)
  • Some menus are indeed too long for some screens (like my laptop screen)

There are requests for a search in the navigation, maybe after we move to pf4 we can implement it.

1 Like
#16

In the past we had a non-full height fly out menu, but I had so many issues navigating from one menu to another. Having it full height worked much better for me so please consider making it 100% instead of 350px.

#17

I am working with @MariSvirik on different options for the sub nav height. Thank you for the feedbacks