[QGIS-Developer] Why was selection tool behaviour changed in 3.x?

[Cory Albrecht]

Cory Albrecht <maps at hanfastolfe.com>
8:14 PM (37 minutes ago)
to Régis
Hello Régis,

Sorry for not being clear - I mean when using the selection tool in
freehand mode. I am definitely not talking about the identification tool,
assuming you're referring to the same thing that I am thinking of?
Ctrl+Shift+I, or the icon that is the cursor with a the letter "i" in a
sold blue circle. I'm not sure I would call that new as it's been part of
QGIS since I started using it in about 2015. Perhaps you're an old salt
from the 1.x days? ;-)

As a principle of UX design, ideally, the user should do the same action -
click and drag - for any type of selection, both to maintain internal
consistency in the application and with common ways of doing things in the
broader computer universe. This lets people learn new software quickly by
having a set of transferable actions that can get them up and running and
doing rudimentary things quickly. It also helps reduce unintended errors
caused by using common actions that get unexpectedly interpreted different
than the user is used to. Things like this contribute to how easy or
frustrating an application is to use, both for new and long time users.

1. For the "Select Feature(s)", click and drag to indicate the diagonally
opposite corners of a selection rectangle.
2. For the "Select Features by Freehand", click and drag to create an
irregular blob of selection area.
3. For the "Select Features by Radius", click and drag to indicate the
centre of a selection circle and it's radius.

In 2.x the answer to all of those was yes, but in 3.x it's yes, no, no.

In vector and raster drawing applications, drawing rectangles, circles and
blobs is done by click and drag, as is selecting rectangular, circular or
irregular blobby areas. If you release and click elsewhere then drag, you
start drawing a new object, or you discard the first selection and start
outlining a new one. Word processing and text section, video editors and
frame selection, sound editors and lengths of time in a track, they all
have the user do these conceptually similar tasks in the same way - click
and drag to create a selection , new click discards old selection.

Another principle of UX design is that you don't change how a user does
something unless there is clear benefit that outweighs the trouble of
relearning, especially for action concepts that are common in the broader
sphere. When you make changes without benefits you cause friction in your
user flows (some call those "point points"), and that means people find
that task (and potentially the application as a whole) difficult and
frustrating to use.

For those three methods of selection there's nothing to be gained by making
QGIS 3.x the odd one out in how this is done. There's no benefit added by
extra functionality in these selection methods. All it does is create pain
points, both by being different from everybody else and by being
inconsistent internally.

The exception to this is the poly gone selection tool. I've never
encountered it outside of QGIS and ArcGIS. Drawing applications have
polygon drawing tools in which you sequentially click the polygon's points,
just like how you create features on polygon or line layers in QGIS, but
there's no polygon selection analogue. As such it makes sense to take the
feature creation method of sequential clicks over for use in a polygon
selection tool rather than coming up with a whole new user flow like click
and drag and tapping the space bar for the points.

And so I wonder - what was the rationale behind making this change?

On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 6:00 AM Régis Haubourg <regis.haubourg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Cory,
> I must say I didn't notice any difference on the selection tool behavior
> on my side.
> I don't think there was any explicit attempt to homogenize the selection
> behavior with the node tool new ergonomy.
>
> Just a check, in the maptool dropdown list for selection tool, are your
> using the freehand selection tool or the classical clic and drag selection
> tool?
>
> I've seen similar surprising issues with the new "identify" tool that now
> can interrogate features in a polygon. Users got confused when they changed
> this behavior by mistake. Could that be your case?
> Cheers
> Régis
>
> Le lun. 8 avr. 2019 à 01:09, Cory Albrecht <maps at hanfastolfe.com> a
> écrit :
>
>> I was wondering why the selection tool behaviour in 3.x was changed from
>> the implementation in 2.18?
>>
>> In 2.18.x when you wanted to select features in a layer, you clicked the
>> primary mouse button, held it, and moves the mouse cursor over the items
>> you wanted to select - known as "click and drag". To help, a shape was
>> drawn on screen for the user to know what they had already dragged the
>> mouse over top of. To add to the selection you used shift plus click and
>> drag, to remove, Ctrl plus click and drag. It the way select tools work
>> broadly across computer world and is intuitive because of it's ubiquity -
>> learn it once, use it everywhere.
>>
>> In 3.x, however, instead of using that common method, it has changed to
>> click and release and move the mouse around. This is a common UI method to
>> set focus to an item for subsequent actions but still be able to move the
>> mouse around without selecting or affecting any other items. I know things
>> would work slightly different in QGIS because of having a distinct
>> selection tool that one must activate, but this removes intuitiveness from
>> the application and makes it more difficult to use without any
>> corresponding gain in functionality.
>>
>> A similar change has also happened in the vertex editor where in 2.18.x
>> single clicking on a vertex used to mean select, and you had to drag (click
>> and hold) to move it. Now, if you click and release, it unexpectedly drags
>> the vertex around as you move the mouse.
>>
>> QGIS having it's own, non-standard mouse actions for tasks that are
>> common (select, copy, delete, etc…) across all types of data (text in a
>> wordprocessor, frames in a movie editor, features in a map editor, etc…) is
>> counter-intuitive and confusing, especially if those non-standard actions
>> are already commonly used for other common user interface actions.
>>
>> It's almost like the QGIS development team has decided that Ctrl+V will
>> now mean "Cut", Ctrl+X will mean "Copy", and to copy have to use Alt+F1 for
>> "Paste". Extending common user interface actions for something in QGIS that
>> has no exact parallel but is still conceptually similar to that common
>> action, like how Ctrl+Alt+V means paste what was copied into the buffer
>> into a brand new layer, that makes sense. But ignoring decades of common UI
>> actions that are in the muscle memory of probably all users makes the
>> programme frustrating and tedious to use as one has to constantly remind
>> themselves that QGIS is different.
>>
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