Drill-down or Tree View?

[kevinr]

What do you think would be best for the web-client UI?

[dserodio]

An AJAX tree widget would be nice.

[rberg]

The ability to select either as a user preference would be ideal!

[greglenain]

Only an AJAX-like tree view would be fast enough to cope with big repository.

[bhoehne]

IMHO a fast tree view could be a great benefit for the Usability of the Web Client - just the previous posings said.

What I am missing in many commercial and open source products is the possibility to browse by category in a tree structure. This would enable a kind of multideminsional browsing because documents in the respository can be in more than one category and therefore been shown in multiple places in the "browse by category"-tree.
Just think about it and how Alfresco could differ from other products with this "little" feature….

[lnagra]

I believe there is a need for a number of user interface metaphors.
Certainly, some of the currrent pickers feel a little 'click heavy' as has been mentioned before.

I would welcome a AJAX enabled tree view component, although I am also a fan of some alternative interfaces. For example, the del.icio.us director, http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/demo.html.

This provides a horizontally scrolling presentation of del.icio.us tags, and is a metaphor that could work well for category selection. I think when you have a large hierarchy or a parent with many child nodes, tree views (which are display vertically) can become difficult to use with spatial awareness impacted. Horizontally scrolling views keep the current location in view at all times. This can help prevent the feeling of being 'lost' in a hierarchy of categories.

[rdanner]

I believe there is a need for a number of user interface metaphors.
Certainly, some of the currrent pickers feel a little 'click heavy' as has been mentioned before.

I would welcome a AJAX enabled tree view component, although I am also a fan of some alternative interfaces. For example, the del.icio.us director, http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/demo.html.

This provides a horizontally scrolling presentation of del.icio.us tags, and is a metaphor that could work well for category selection. I think when you have a large hierarchy or a parent with many child nodes, tree views (which are display vertically) can become difficult to use with spatial awareness impacted. Horizontally scrolling views keep the current location in view at all times. This can help prevent the feeling of being 'lost' in a hierarchy of categories.

Wow I had not seen that interface.  Not bad, but for someone not exposed to it and used to traditional windows a little awkward.  For some of us non traditional interface is great because we are adventurous.

I used to work for a steel mill in process control and we made an effort to make the look and feel of our HMI (human machine interfaces) consistent with each other even though the processes they where servicing were extremely different.  It helped cross train operators.  If we asked them to learn a new machine or process they felt less intimidated, ?it?s totally different, but it smells like home".  I don?t know anything about UI in fact I am pretty poor as a UI designer but I can appreciate the idea that familiar is usually the right way to go unless the innovation is revolutionary.  Evolutionary interfaces usually come and go, at best the serve to mark the way but they don?t help a product differentiate, they tend to detract and at best be novel.

Thanks for putting up this example. I wish more people would show off their favorite interfaces or even better mock up or create new alfresco components and views.  Even if you can?t write a stitch of code, you may be able to weave a Visio or power point or just link to your favorite interface.

Question Inagra: What do you like the most about the delicio.us interface and do you see that as a component for alfresco AND if so where/how (I think that was more then one question but lets pretend   )

[simon]

Wow I had not seen that interface. Not bad, but for someone not exposed to it and used to traditional windows a little awkward. For some of us non traditional interface is great because we are adventurous.

This kind of view is used in Mac OS X and it works very intuitive… Hadn't used Mac OS before but it's my favorite view since I bought one. Just wanted to say that "non traditional" doesn't mean "not intuitive". This would be a great interface for Alfresco if you ask me.

[img]http://time-tripper.com/uipatterns/Patterns/Cascading_Lists/osx-finder.gif[/img]
Found on time-tripper.com

[rdanner]

Wow I had not seen that interface. Not bad, but for someone not exposed to it and used to traditional windows a little awkward. For some of us non traditional interface is great because we are adventurous.

This kind of view is used in Mac OS X and it works very intuitive… Hadn't used Mac OS before but it's my favorite view since I bought one. Just wanted to say that "non traditional" doesn't mean "not intuitive". This would be a great interface for Alfresco if you ask me.

[img]http://time-tripper.com/uipatterns/Patterns/Cascading_Lists/osx-finder.gif[/img]
Found on time-tripper.com

Point taken

Generalizations (like the one I made) always have real exception and Apple is one of those companies that are good at sniffing them out.  They tend to make revolutionary-ish change to UI not evolutionary changes in which they are able to get great functionality through incredibly simple UI.  UI innovation is a core focus of Apple.  They create and in most cases the world imitates.

[jaec]

My vote for the tree view because it is one of the most powerful UI components ever made, i think is because it can handle very much hierarchized data wich is the case for file systems.

Regards.