After some experience with our current mobile view I suggest the following changes. The idea is to make the UI more intuitive – all the possible widgets would be visible while scrolling down the detail form. So far we had 3 different places to interact with the detail view: The form with the widgets itself, the navigation bar and the action menu.
Parent/child navigation
Nowadays it is solved by showing navigation buttons in the bottom of the screen laid over the input boxes.
New: Let’s convert them to buttons shown at the end of the screen (after the last input). We’ve also been displaying the containers (e.g. AsTab12 or SplitPanel3) in order to make some order. We should skip it and just display all the possible child sections/plugins, skipping those containers.
Group boxes
I suggest to interpret the group boxes in a detail view as collapsible panels (with a title of the group box). All widgets without a group box should be put first and then all the collapsed group boxes. Only if the group box is the first widget on screen (either a single group box on screen or one of multiple but no widgets without a group box), it should be expanded.
The idea of initially collapsed groups is to conserve space with huge forms and to show the navigation/actions as soon as possible without too much scrolling.
Action buttons
Currently the action buttons are available in the bottom toolbar.
New: I suggest to put action buttons on the form, similar to the parent/child navigation. So the detail form would show:
- Non-grouped widgets
- Collapsed groups (except of the first group if non-grouped widgets do not exist)
- Navigation buttons to child sections
- Action buttons
Drop-down type action buttons should still work the way that they would show the submenu, maybe expanded over the whole screen like the other pop-ups (about, combobox dropdown).
The toolbar would only display close/save/refresh/next buttons.