Project: low-hanging UX/UI to improve ad-hoc analysis in Viewer

[gavrelina]

Context

The heavy lifting of the Viewer is to help users debug and make sense of whatever they are working on, and that often involves ad-hoc investigation, be it comparing several versions of the same algorithm or desired behavior with an actual behavior. While this may incorporate many various needs, let's try to simplify it into a following user flow:

From here we can zoom in to even more concrete micro-tasks, just to give you a few examples:

• Search for a non-visualized entity and add it to existing plot view
• Look for 3 visualized instances and hide all the other ones
• Spot the outlier in one view (i.e. map) and add a corresponding entity to a new view (i.e. timeseries)

Objectives and goals

To make such interactions more seamless and intuitive there are several UX improvements we can bring, so that the whole ad-hoc analysis flow would become more seamless and intuitive

Evidences

Collection of various user requests and user interview calls support the need for more contextual exploration in the Viewer, some user feedback examples include:

• poor discoverability of existing functionalities to add entities to a new views
• poor discoverability of existing functionalities to modify entities in the existing view
• long list of entities makes it cumbersome to quickly find the required entity
• current query expression of the entity path filter does not take into account the data structure of the hierarchy, which makes the query harder to use
• improve workflow when analysing with plots, i.e. allow for non time axis, lock the X axis of several plots

What and how?

So this sounds like a big thing! How can we crunch it into smaller digestible pieces that would either already bring value or serve as a stable baseline to build on top of?

1. Drag and drop

• do as per: Trackig issue: drag-and-drop improvement #7108

2. Search for entities

• What? : 1 or many entities. Typically similar types of entities which are located in different hierarchy trees, i.e. all acceleration values
• Where? local: blueprint/streams/entity-path-filter; and global: like a command pallette
• Why? search to add result(s) to an existing/new view; to hide/show result(s); to hide everything but the result(s)
• Solution? @gavrelina to figure out what's the first design and possible interactions for the first step of such search. Preliminary ideas: start with local search, enable more fuzzy-like search. Later: possibility to add fancy filters (at some point, like semantic search, think of searching specifically for an archetype, which is not necessary to start with), also a global search panel.

3. Plots analysis improvements

hover select states for plots, dots on plots?
in progress

4. Pleasant and small nits

• Change icons for the hierarchy tree chevron from closed shape to open shape  #8268
• Make the icons next to an entity 'grey-er' to improve visual hierarchy #8269
• Hide collapsing chevrons from blueprint and streams tree when mouse is out of panel #8270
• Make text input more visible #8271
• Keep the same width when entering editing mode for the playback/fps widget #8272
• Dataframe view: add some horizontal spacing between columns #8273
• Change the view type from the selection panel

Suggest postpone:

• Support range multi-selection with shift modifier #4917
• We have discussed once to remove Projections — thoughts on this? if not => then change the indentation of it, so it would not stick out as if it's hierarchically on another level (see nuscenes example)