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Sunday, June 6, 2010

Multi-pane confusion

One of Blender's core UI features has always been the ability to dice up your window into multiple regions and panes in a non-overlapping user interface. Blender 2.5 has a problem where it's too easy to be confused about which region that sub-regions belong to. Case in point: Look at the toolbar in the middle of the screenshot below - It's very hard to determine which region the toolbar belongs to at a glance.



Blender 2.49 before it had a rather simple solution of rounding the corners of regions to solve this problem. However, since then 2.5 has added toolbars and sub-regions many places which amplifies this issue, so merely having round corners might not be enough.


Here's a mockup of a similar concept in 2.5. The larger borders between regions coupled with small rounded corners, makes it clear which toolbars and headers relates to what regions.




Another possible solution would be to make sub-regions transparent, making it immediately obvious which region they belong to by identifying the background of the window. 


8 comments:

  1. Could we get both? I simply love all the work that has gone into the 2.5 UI so far, but the one thing that is still bugging me is that 2.5 seems way more messy than 2.49. Pressing N resulted in nice floating panels that did not clutter the visible area as much the current sub regions. Although I understand that floating windows are not exactly Blender's UI philosophy, cluttering important screen real estate is a dangerous thing. Therefore please make sub regions transparent.

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  2. I like the transparent background idea, looks a lot cleaner solution than big borders all over the place.

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  3. I like the proposed round corner design, but it does make the UI a bit noisy.

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  4. Honestly, I like both of the suggestions.

    I can see the reason behind the claim of round corners making the UI "busy" as it does indeed do this, but personally I think the differentiation between work areas makes this a reasonable trade-off.

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  5. Transparent! definitely.. The borders look way too big and clumsy, like a fisher price toy.

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  6. The transparent option looks far better to me. Not only is it terrific eyecandy, but it makes it instantly obvious which region a sub-pane belongs to without requiring any extra screen real-estate (as thicker borders would).

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  7. The transparent option is far better

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  8. +100 on the transparent panels!

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