Re: [pgadmin-hackers] [Design update] Style guide for pgAdmin4

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 11:55 AM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Shirley Wang <swang@pivotal.io> wrote:

When you say "icon" here, are you talking about the combo box arrow, or icons on the items themselves? The latter are often useful if you have items of different types in the same list.

I think we should have the combo box arrow, to show the user they don't have to type if they don't want to.

I'm talking about the combo box arrow. I think that's fine, but in that case users shouldn't be able type, they should only be able to select from a group of options, like this:

From what I understand, the text field where a user can type in is for searching through options available to them. If we know that people tend to search by typing more than scrolling, we should use the precedent for type ahead dropdowns. 

We are using a much older precedent - one used in Windows for 20+ years (possibly other OSs too).

Remember that some of these combo boxes contain values that are specific to the database object - the user may not know what to start typing, so the arrow gives them a hint that they can get a list by clicking - or they can type.

The real difference here is that we also include the x to allow the box to be cleared, where Windows would add a blank option as the first thing in the list typically.

I see. It feels like we're at a standstill as to which precedent to use and neither of us is wrong. This might be a good candidate for user testing. We can see how people are using the x as well as learn more about typing / selecting an option behavior. 

I believe there are some dropdowns in the partition design we can use to test. If it doesn't make sense there, I'm fine putting this in the back burner until there is a good workflow to test it.