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

Wed Apr 10 08:38:15 PDT 2019

Hi

On 09.04.19 02:53, Cory Albrecht wrote:
>
>
>       Cory Albrecht <maps at hanfastolfe.com <mailto: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.
I just tested and the answer are, as Régis mentioned, the same as in
2.18 ( tested using 3.4.4). the behavior you describe is only true when
you activate "select by polygon".
>
> 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.
That is exactly why QGIS does it the same why as other tools.
>
> 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?

a very quick google search returned the whole rationale to changing the
behavior of the Node tool [0] but none for the behavior you describe,
which I could not reproduce. Could you show us a screencast?

[0] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/69

oh, and cheers

Marco

>
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 6:00 AM Régis Haubourg
> <regis.haubourg at gmail.com <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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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-- 
Marco Bernasocchi
QGIS.org Co-chair
marco at opengis.ch <mailto:marco at opengis.ch>
+41 (0)79 467 24 70 <tel:+41794672470>

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