Dev:Ref/Outdated/Proposals/UI/Info Architecture/Guidelines

Initial guidelines of how to lay out the panels within a window and structure the information within them

Use a progression from general->specific

So more generalised controls are on the left (horizontal) or top (vertical) Eg. for lamp buttons:

• Lamp object specific (eg. lamp type, energy, databrowse, preview)
  • Lamp obdata specific (eg. Spot: angle, square or Area: size, shape)
  • Shadows (eg. Buffer shadows: buffer size, bias or Raytraced shadows: samples, umbra)
• Textures (eg. texture slots, blend modes, mapping) This may likely tie in with an idea of arranging the buttons based on blender's OOPs datablock structure, so the progression would go (from Object controls to ObData controls to Sub-object controls

This also has the effect of structuring the dependency of panels, so that the most variable panels (eg. those only available in edit mode) are to the right/bottom, and won't change the ordering other other panels when they appear or disappear.

Eg. for edit buttons:

• Object level (eg. object name, datablock menu)
• ObData level (eg. mesh subsurf controls, texmesh)
• Vertex/Edge/Face level (eg. vertex groups, material groups)

Use a progression in order of workflow

Where possible (particularly when the button panels do not follow an object-oriented structure), order the controls from left to right / top to bottom according to the order of their use in the relevant process Eg. for scene/render buttons:

• File paths
• Formats, sizes
• Effects, other settings
• Render / Anim / Play

-- Matt Ebb - 01 Sep 2004