[QGIS-Developer] Why was selection tool behaviour changed in 3.x?
Bernhard Ströbl
bernhard.stroebl at jena.de
Thu Apr 11 00:15:51 PDT 2019
Hi,
@Marco I can second Cory that the selection tools' behaviour is
different between 2.18 (tested on Win) and 3.* (tested on Win and Ubuntu)
1) select by rectangle: behaves the same (click + drag)
2) select by polygon: behaves the same
3) select by freehand: behaves differently: 2.18 click + drag 3.* click
+ click
4) select by circle: behaves differently: 2.18 click + drag 3.* click +
click
I have no strong feeling for either behaviour (hardly use options 2 to
4) but I would think that the behaviour should be consistent within QGIS
(either all click + drag or all click + click). Click + drag is well
established (e.g. Inkscape, Bentley Microstation) at least for the
rectangular selection, so maybe it would be better to use this approach.
Furthermore this is how the rectangular selection works in the layout, too.
@Cory concerning the vertex-editing tool there has been a lot of
discussion and there were good reasons to change its behaviour. A lot
has been improved recently: most prominent IMHO: feature can be locked
for exclusive editing with a right click (similar to selecting a feature
for editing in 2.*) but can be edited directly without locking e.g. by
simply picking and moving vertices. May I therefore ask you to try again
with current master (or a nightly build)? And may I further ask you to
forget how it was in QGIS 2 and simply try how it works in 3?
AFAIK there is no "standard" in mouse behaviour for vertex editing. CAD
uses click + click (I can at least say for Microstation), Inkscape uses
click + drag, so if one or the other seems familiar might depend on
one's background.
just my 2ct
Bernhard
Am 10.04.2019 um 17:38 schrieb Marco Bernasocchi:
> 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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Bernhard Ströbl
Anwendungsbetreuer GIS
Kommunale Immobilien Jena
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E-Mail: bernhard.stroebl at jena.de
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