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Consolidate 'Edit' functions in Projects to a single area
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On the Project Page right now we have 4 actions that could be put under an "Edit Project" set of subpages. These would lay out like Settings does, where there is an edit page and various panels for people, photo, archiving, etc. This would reduce 3 of the 12 or action menu items we have.

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An alternative that I've been thinking about on-and-off for a while is letting actions group into submenus. I think this has a couple of advantages over moving these items to a separate page:

  • Submenus would let us consolidate more stuff which we can't reasonably move to separate pages, like"Edit Dependencies"/"Edit Differential Revisions"/"Edit Pholio Mocks" in Maniphest and "Blame/Highlighting/Lint" in Diffusion, and maybe "View Tasks / View Wiki" in Projects.
  • We don't end up with a weird workflow for "delete", where we have a dialog-page or nav-into-dialog or something.
  • This stuff generally stays more consistent across applications.

Roughly, my thinking was to just add disclosure groups?

|> Edit Project...

And you click it and get:

V Edit Project...
  * Edit Details
  * Archive Project
  * Edit Members
  * Edit Picture
  * View Edit History

On mobile, we'd just expand everything by default, probably. We could either hide the groups or retain them as section headers.

We could also do something more adventurous like have submenus pop out on hover/click, but this involves a lot more JS and has more "funkiness" concerns. I'd rather move there gradually if we do want to end up there.

Does that sound like a reasonable alternative? Generally, do you think submenus are worth playing with, or not-so-great?

A v2 thought I had on submenus was to do this when they're open:

V Edit Project... (unlocked icon)

When you click the (unlocked icon), it changes to a (locked icon) and the submenu stays open by default. Then we could be more aggressive about hiding things in submenus, since users who hit those actions frequently could lock them open. I think we could wait for feedback about "I have to click this menu too many times" before pursing that, though. I'd guess we won't get any of that feedback on Project edit operations, which I'd guess are rare.

I don't see any reason both couldn't be done. I think a single side navigation with multiple edit pages is generally much easier for users to explore and find what they want - especially in a new user situation. It's something I find I like to do, explore all the various things I can tweak and edit, when I just went to change one thing.

The other page we have like this is Diffusion, but that puts a bunch of edit panels on a single page. What do you think about that approach -- one "Edit" link leading to a page of overview panels with "Edit this thing" and history at the bottom? I think the design is probably more obviously useful in Diffusion since it has a ton of administrative summary information, but I could see it working well in Projects too.

I like the Settings-like UI conceptually, but I think it was pretty bad when we had that mode in Repositories, and the new Diffusion edit interface is far more clear. I think the only other app which works like this today is "People", which feels weird to me and which users pretty consistently have difficulty with (I've had 3-4 users who were unable to locate the "Change Username" option). Part of this is probably chicken-and-egg, since we don't have UIs which do that kind of layout anywhere else, but even knowing how the UI works I feel like it's weird every time I run into it. I'd generally favor changing all of that stuff into a Diffusion-style layout too.

(On the other hand, Settings itself feels fairly pretty intuitive to me.)

I think both is still a good answer. ;)

Have all the panels on one page, and a sidenav full of #anchors so people can more easily find things. One exception might be 'project members' but I'm ok if that is outside of 'edit project'.

Yeah, I think the menu grouping is good for the other cases no matter what, and that both projects and user editing would benefit from better organization. I'm not totally sold on combining the two, but we can try it out and if we don't stick with it we've only made everything better.

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Projects are much better these days, I think this has been naturally resolved by the expanded edit page.