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Select widget mode is confusing #8155
Description
It's unintuitive that we have both "Select widget mode" in Flutter DevTools and a magnifier icon at the bottom left of the app that you need to click to select another widget after selecting the first widget [1].
When you first select "Select Widget Mode" in the DevTools inspector, you can select a widget in the app.
Any subsequent selections in the app require you to then click the magnifier icon.
Other users have found this confusing, see #6876.
A few suggestions to make this less confusing:
- Always highlight widgets in the app when a user selects them in their Widget Tree (regardless of whether "select widget mode" is enabled). This is how other tools work - in-app select widget mode is decoupled from selection from a developer tool.
- Either have the "select widget mode" button (in DevTools) or the "select widget" button on the app.
- If we have the "select widget mode" button in DevTools, it should get automatically disabled once a widget has been selected, so that a user must manually click it again before selecting a new widget on their app.
- If we only have the "select widget" button in the app, we should change the icon to the "select widget mode" icon we use in DevTools, and add a semantic label and tooltip.
Activity
[-]Select widget mode stops sometimes stops working[/-][+]Select widget mode sometimes stops working[/+][-]Select widget mode sometimes stops working[/-][+]Select widget mode is confusing (and possible unreliable?)[/+]elliette commentedon Aug 8, 2024
We have a few hypothesis from the walkthrough that we would like to try out for the next one:
IF we change the widget in the app overlay THEN less time making a mental connection to the feature
IF we ask users to use the widget button overlay the same way both first use and subsequent uses THEN less mental overhead and more quickly (less effort) to manipulate second and third etc widgets
[-]Select widget mode is confusing (and possible unreliable?)[/-][+]Select widget mode is confusing[/+]elliette commentedon Nov 5, 2024
We have decided to address this by having the button that appears on the device be an "Exit select widget mode" button.
When a user enables widget selection, they can continue to select widgets on their app until they either exit widget selection from the DevTools Inspector or by clicking the on-device exit button.
As part of this, we need to make sure that the exit button has a tooltip so that users aren't confused when its functionality changes.
On-device Widget Inspector button exits widget selection (#158219)
On-device Widget Inspector button exits widget selection (#158219)