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Collapsible/expandable arrow icon when using Views in categories
Posted Nov 08, 2024
Hi team! I love the new ‘Categorizing your views’ feature as doco'd here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8009260752794-Categorizing-your-views . Thank you for bringing that into the world!!
One thing that I'm still not able to get used to, is the icon showing whether the view is collapsed or not. I ALWAYS (despite now using this feature for a number of weeks) get confused by the direction of the arrow, and whether the group is actually expanded or collapsed.
I don't think I'm the only one, because I've had to field a few calls from people saying ‘I’m not seeing the views under section x' and I've had to explain that they need to expand the category to see the views nested inside - and their response is ‘oh I thought it was expanded’ 😆
Finally got around to talking to my sub-conscious brain and seeing why it was always confused, and I think the issue is that (this is probably exaggeration) every other product has their arrows pointing in the opposite direction. I've found that most other products use the down arrow to show that the folder/category/etc is expanded - whereas Zendesk views use the down arrow to show that (I'm assuming) you can press down to show more items - i.e. the down arrow indicates that the category is collapsed.
To illustrate:
Zendesk views
- Collapsed category (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces down
- Expanded category (sub-items shown) - arrow faces up
then contrast this with all the other tools which have trained my brain the other way:
Gmail mail folders
- Collapsed folder (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded folder (sub-items shown) - arrow faces down
Sublime text
- Collapsed folder (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded folder (sub-items shown) - arrow faces down
Source tree
- Collapsed folder (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded folder (sub-items shown) - arrow faces down
Jira navigation
- Collapsed folder (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded folder (sub-items shown) - arrow faces down
Apple notes
- Collapsed section (section text hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded section (section text shown) - arrow faces down
Apple finder
- Collapsed folder (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded folder (sub-items shown) - arrow faces down
Safari / Edge / Chrome bookmarks folders
- Collapsed folder (sub-items hidden) - arrow faces to the right
- Expanded folder (sub-items shown) - arrow faces down
…. i'll stop, but in just hunting around in applications that I have easily at hand, I couldn't find any examples of an app/tool doing it the other way - all the examples (even Google and Apple seem to agree) seem to use the same unwritten convention of “arrow facing downwards = section/folder/category is expanded”.
Anyway, it's not a huge thing, but it does literally confuse me every time I use them 😄
Thanks for listening!
2
3 comments
Scott Tynan
Absolutely agree! This was doing my head in too and I was only in the sandbox seeing how it would look.
I prefer the right facing arrow for collapsed and down for expanded.
0
Shawna James
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. This has been logged for our PM team to review. For others who may be interested in this feature request, please add your support by upvoting this post and/or adding your use case to the comments below. Thank you again!
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Donald Clark-Charest
100% agree. I came here to post the exact same thing. It's not good UX practice as it's not the behaviour people expect from the icons. It even lead one of our agents to think that they weren't able to see particular views, because they had uncategorized views under a collapsed category, so the down arrow had them thinking that those views were part of the category.
1