Menu placement on tablet devices

[claudiobosticco]

Hello, I just realized that the Menu.placement is "fillScreen" only on handset devices. In this regard, it has a different behavior from Select/ComboBoxItem where the placement is fillPanel also for tablets.

May I ask if in your experience this is actually the best behaviour for users, or if you found yourself changing this setting?

[Isomorphic]

In implementing apps for customers, we have never actually changed this setting. It's a bit hard to imagine a case where using "fillPanel" would be wrong for a tablet, as the notion of "panel" in this case is a panel of a SplitPane / TriplePane.

So perhaps something like: there's a Tree on the left, and it's filterable via a comboBox in the same panel. But that comboBox shows multiple fields, even though the Tree being filtered shows only one, so the comboBox shows excessive clipping when confined to the same space as the Tree it is filtering.

That case is pretty rare, and hasn't come up in apps we've built for customers. But it could come up, and if so, changing to "fillScreen" in that case makes sense.

But we would recommend leaving the default of "fillPanel" on tablets alone, because generally on a tablet, you have enough screen real estate that it's better to continue to show part of the screen when a comboBox opens, rather than cover everything. It helps the user maintain context about what screen they are on and what they are up to, especially because users are often distracted mid-task.

[claudiobosticco]

Hello, thank you for the clarifying response regarding Select/ComboboxItem.

However, I still have a doubt regarding the Menu, which on tablets behaves by default like on desktop, whereas I would have expected a default placement of fillPanel as with SelectItem.

[Isomorphic]

Oh, you were asking the reverse? Are you saying that fillPanel seems a better default for Menu on the tablet form factor, whereas in fact it's fillScreen by default?

[claudiobosticco]

actually I'm saying that the default seems to be the same as on desktop, on tablets:

https://smartclient.com/smartclient-...Menu.placement

this is what I see using the simulator:

[Isomorphic]

OK, now we see. So the answer is still "no" - we've never, when building an app for a customer, changed the default Menu.placement to either "fillPanel" or "fillScreen" for the tablet form factor.

As we mentioned above, in general, it's better to keep the rest of the UI visible, if there's plenty of screen real estate for the Menu or ComboBox.

The main reason we could see for using fillPanel/fillScreen placement for a Menu on the tablet would be if the menu had so many items that it was required to scroll. In that case, the fillPanel UI might offer quicker or more usable scrolling. So perhaps an improved default would be to use "fillPanel" if there are enough items to require scrolling.

Are you asking because you frequently find yourself setting custom placement for Menus on tablet?

[claudiobosticco]

Hi, actually, I don't have much experience using SmartClient apps on tablets. However, I am currently evaluating the usability of an application that will definitely require some adjustments.

For some reason, I remembered that the menu on tablets did not use the same mode as on desktop. So I had some doubts about the usability with touch devices, but now that I have tested it on a physical device, it seems to work well. I hope users won't give me different feedback. Your suggestion to use fillPanel for large number of items makes sense tho.