Logical placement of on-map and header widgets for an intuitive user experience
We’re using the foldable theme for a series on internal WAB apps and have a need to land on some consistency with widget placement. Most app’s will share a core group of widgets (e.g. select), but there’s inevitably some widgets that’ll be app specific (e.g. Grid)
Interested in how people have differentiated between what’s an “on map” widget and what’s in the header controller? We have two opposing views on what basis we may determine widget placement:
- Approach 1:
- On-map widgets: are those that require user input on the map itself (e.g. select, draw, measure). As we only have 5 spots, priority would be given to the frequently used widgets
- Header widgets: everything else
- Approach 2:
- On-map widgets: are those that are focused on layer management (Layers, Legend, Add Data, BaseMaps). This is more likely to be a stable and consistent set of swidgets.
- Header widgets: everything else
To me I keep coning back to the select widget being the perfect example of something that works well as an on-map widget. It gets lost in the header, and my 30+ years of GIS usage wants it to be closer to the features that I’m interacting with but there’s lots of other things in play here, plus a new generation of users as well.
Approach 2 will probably result in a more stable set of on-map widgets...
