[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #28979: Customizer panels should have the same priority hierarchy as Sections

[WordPress Trac]

#28979: Customizer panels should have the same priority hierarchy as Sections
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 Reporter:  mattwiebe     |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)  |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  4.0
Component:  Customize     |     Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal        |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  ux-feedback   |     Focuses:  ui
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Comment (by celloexpressions):

 Replying to [comment:4 mattwiebe]:
 > Putting Panels at the top is only punting on the already-existing UI
 problems here and hoping that nobody will use a short enough screen and/or
 register enough panels to create the unsolved problem. That's maybe
 tolerable if the plan is to tackle this properly in 4.1 but that feels
 pretty questionable.
 Could you elaborate on the existing UI problems you see here? If the issue
 is too many sections/hard to find certain sections, I wouldn't say that
 panels relate to the issue, as they serve to provide different contexts
 (for example that could eventually be deep-linked) rather than purely
 adding hierarchy to sections. Something like #28504 would help a lot for
 that too.
 > Look at a common UI pattern like a dropdown menu, which interleaves top
 level and secondary-level items in the same hierarchy:
 > Things are sorted by their importance in their context, not according to
 the type of thing that they are.
 I wouldn't compare this to a dropdown menu. That's a hierarchy of actions,
 whereas in the Customizer we have a hierarchy of control containers. The
 iOS settings look like they're a hybrid between containers and controls,
 rather than control containers and super-containers, but are a closer
 comparison.

 > > Some things sliding down and others sliding sideways and switching
 contexts seemingly at random results in incredibly confusing UX, and it's
 nearly impossible to tell which direction the arrow points if they aren't
 grouped by direction (and it's not great anyway).
 >
 > Has this been tested? I don't think that's actually going to be a
 problem. Sure, maybe this needs to be designed better (icons, better
 indication of expected behaviour), but I'm seeing assumptions that may not
 bear out.
 See screen captures above. I find it much less intuitive, even confusing.
 Could also do some user tests. Again, having more than one panel for
 testing purposes is important.

 Regardless of what we do here, we should assign a priority to widgets
 based on a hierarchy of potential future core panels so that plugin panels
 can prioritize accordingly.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/28979#comment:5>
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