GoKawiilRauno's Field Notes #2
Vercel Project Cards
I started by tweaking the padding and co-located information to reduce the vertical space occupied by each card. Some data was also omitted, for example we realised that we don't need to show the project branch on the card which is generally always "main".
It's important to understand that these cards occupy a lot of space on the screen on this view. It's easier to digest cards when there are less rows on the card and information is tight and terse.
Here's a before & after of the changes. We even gained an extra row in the grid.
Context menu
Another change we made was to the project card shortcut menu. We're still testing this change behind a feature flag. At first it seemed like it would simply clean up the card since the ··· button repeats a lot.
Later we realised that we want to use more context menus in the future because they have an obvious benefit over an explicit 24×24 control because you can activate a context menu from anywhere on the surface. Of course there's a tiny issue with affordance and learning curves yada yada yada... but apps like Linear make it work, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Our mitigation against context menu discoverability is to place the same actions in the detail view behind a regular dropdown menu. This way no one misses out on anything, the context menu is just a shortcut.
Widgets
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