I'm baffled.
I'm baffled. I have a child item in a list and I want to outdent it. When I use SHIFT-TAB, the item is outdented...but also moved below the other children in the list. In apps like OmniOutliner, an outdent simply moves the item to the left.
Is there a way to outdent without moving the item? For me, the current behavior makes Checkvist unusable as items are jumping all over the place when I want to change the hierarchy. Thanks!
Is there a way to outdent without moving the item? For me, the current behavior makes Checkvist unusable as items are jumping all over the place when I want to change the hierarchy. Thanks!
Hello Matt Kursh, thanks for the question. The current behaviour is based on a principle that Shift+Tab does not change the structure of other items in the list, and it affects only the position of the selected item.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of OmniOutliner, after making Shift+Tab, I don't have a clue how to undo this action, because all items below became sub-items of the given one. If I press Tab, it moves the current item with all its new children. For me, it is a bit confusing.
If you want to make the change in a way OmniOuliner does, you should first indent the items below to make them children, and only after that outdent the parent. You can use multiple selection to indent several items at once.
Would it work for you?
Kirill Maximov Thanks for the response. FWIW, I've included a little video that shows you how OmniOutliner handles this. What I'm showing is using SHIFT-TAB and then undoing it. The behavior makes total sense to me.
ReplyDeleteIn Checkvist, the behavior really confuses me. If I've got a long outline and I outdent something in the middle, the item gets moved off screen. I have to go searching for where it landed. And, I notice that undo won't work on the outdent, so it takes a lot of work to move the item back where it was - I don't necessarily even know where it was in the first place.
The strategy you suggest, of indenting the items first, has several problems. First, in a longer outline when the item (that I want to outdent) has many items below it, it's a bunch of work (and scrolling) to select the items and indent them. Second, when I outdent, the item and it's children all get moved down, which I never wanted in the first place.
I'm not sure what it is about the implementation of Checkvist that makes the OmniOutliner model difficult, but don't understand what the advantages are of the Checkvist approach. When I outdent an item, I want it to do just that - why would I want it to also jump elsewhere in the outline? I can always move it elsewhere if I want to...but shouldn't that be my choice?
Thanks for your help. I'll keep trying to use Checkvist. It's a wonderful tool, very powerful and fun to use. In the past, I was focused on creating outlines. Now that I have a lot of editing to do, I'm very concerned about how items jump around when outdented.
https://video-downloads.googleusercontent.com/ABzBgw1i4ZOTMUAlFTWsam6xQej8zIOju36LIq1AUc7r-GOYB9NfWv9ZdBjPGqHJ5je8Z6BVbEYQoICQq1wYb6AzHkTWgvTmTFaoMgVH54hef45l-NC-0sT-t51QHAyvYs9Hs0D_P3i0fNtLQ9XQq-PbD3FxCJLBTjn17LUNGq4Xn3_r3APYPkyJUhS3ZIxrQaBvmafd2kT5T5qkx0kxWMfy2E_E8-GlWnqohReymZHWGbXMGax5VhfaBxVegJRmrW48WbVX9TOc5meGQ7WRw6aUaqkq0ffSW3oljyoUUdWCyWEj8vhwTen37gXM7slenjC1n3P7AOV-MiDau5u4LMwjwLic-VO9k_ftgZ27PESCD-SzXzDbfBN3KhDcZpTW7e2oh1mpImb2V2GQIDYq6qDJwKa-5pM8dwyj03EGMZEmTPUnN8_As0jgvIAC71mGR9RaxOQNczF5rSh74WErteRKaRpHIFg79ZIO7J3NWxnlv-Iiya6psExk6kneswLoM970-hdMbEU27P8RWnQQQfhMSn5TTQbBDWs8tYOdst4UdbzYMcNFwB2XcUrMcmu7vs9HO7dW1zqpN9w04t1OZwYCr2857hyB-Qii6Ju6zI2WgCsKUOigEBgaBikVCy15XWBI7o0LDpkZpx0QNXCUuff2ObyeuiqaOCDb-nlQZd6jfRlkJlpGSN5qJ9HZ6FBp7H0QmBifamVUTmOcaCwgGbpmrMBHjcswjI437HPYkkHSfjNZBXyf2ipSBr2FxkquaHo-RMCRdGTkGMFQ6AbUVZVn7UipQUN4bNcgvfOZA1YfLGumdw8r3yk
Hello Matt Kursh, thanks for the detailed answer. The situation is, that the current behaviour has been implemented in Checkvist from the very beginning, and it was >8 years ago. Definitely, there are many users who get used to it, even if it may be confusing at the first glance.
ReplyDeleteIt is quite possible to implement the Shift+Tab in a way OmniOuliner does. But first, I believe it should be an option (due to the existing userbase), and second, it requires UNDO for the list item reordering operation.
About current behaviour in Checkvist and moving item back after shift+tab - you can cut it with Ctrl+X and paste it in the place you need with Ctrl+V, where it was before. Unfortunately, there is no a similar trick in a OmniOutliner way.
We have a request about Undo for changing the order or nesting of the items, but it is not in the very nearest plans - https://checkvist.uservoice.com/admin/forums/2121-checkvist-web/suggestions/31071328-undo-more-actions
As for the alternative shift+tab way - I could not find a request for that, though I remember some discussions about it some time ago.
I would encourage you to create such a request in our uservoice forum, so we could return to this point later.
Thanks a lot again,
Kirill Maximov Thanks for your replies. I happened to be working on an outline in Quip today and I noticed that it worked like OmniOutliner (it's not so much that I noticed something special, I just noticed that it did what I expected).
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I've been doing UX for 30+ years at Apple and MSFT so I've got some experience with this stuff. It sounds like users haven't made a big deal about this issue but in my experience users don't always know why they find a product unsatisfactory - they just don't "like it". Changing the hierarchy is such a fundamental part of using an outline processor and I don't see how the current implementation would match users' expectations or preferences (other than those folks who've used it a lot and become accustomed to it).
When it comes to changing the hierarchy, there there are some scenarios in which I'm not even sure how to "get there from here" to shape the hierarchy the way I want it.
One note: you say above that I can use cut and paste to return an item back where it belongs after using SHIFT-TAB. Remember, though, that the item may have been moved far down the document with the SHIFT-TAB and I often find it quite difficult to remember where it was.
There's no other tool that I can find with Checkvist's rich features so I'll keep using it. It is a very robust product and I'm very glad you've invented it! Take care - matt
Hello Matt Kursh,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the answer. Quip is a good tool, as well as many others. Some of them have OmniOutliner model, some of them use Checkvist model.
We'll consider changing the behavior of the shift+tab, but as I said, it also requires some preliminary work to do and some other features should be implemented first.
Thanks again,
Just as feedback from another user, while I understand how it I can feel disorienting for items to drop to the bottom of the list when outdented, I would find it quite disruptive to have sibling items instantly become child items of an item that is outdented.
ReplyDeleteI personally cannot think of many use cases where a user with a long list of items decides that a random item should be outdented and that all items below that item in the list should now become children of that item. This would affect the relationship of these items with their parent items quite drastically.
Rather, it makes more sense that most users would want to change the hierarchical level of the item they selected without affecting surrounding items. In such cases, if sibling items automatically became children of the outdented item, users would have to select all these new child items and correct their hierarchy in the list every single time an item was outdented.
That said, it can definitely be disorienting when an outdented item simply appears to vanish when working in a long list (because the item drops below the visible screen). Perhaps an animation or tooltip (e.g. "Item 2 outdented and moved to end of list" displayed at bottom of browser window when item's new position is not in view) would improve UX by making it clearer for users what just happened to the item.