should groups be persistent across sessions? (ie if you refresh or open the space on another device, should the groups be maintained)
should you only be able to have one group per space or multiple?
what happens if the same card belongs to multiple groups? (what happens if i drag it, do both groups move?)
if you select one/some of the cards in a group and hit ctrl-shift-g to ungroup does it remove the whole group, or just modifies the group to remove the selected cards from the group?
Iâll look at other software (eg balsamiq) to answer these Qs , but typically design software has a âlayersâ panel which helps w these issues, so the answers there may not make sense in kinopio.
should you only be able to have one group per space or multiple?
more than one, please
what happens if the same card belongs to multiple groups? (what happens if i drag it, do both groups move?)
a card would only belong to one group imho
if you select one/some of the cards in a group and hit ctrl-shift-g to ungroup does it remove the whole group, or just modifies the group to remove the selected cards from the group?
removing the whole group would be fine for me, but no strong opinion, whatever is easier to implement
Same with adding to a group, whatever is easier. I can imagine merging new cards into an existing group but also wouldnât mind to first having to âungroupâ and then create a group from a new selection.
Very cool, looking forward if and what you come up with
Yeah, oh wow, this would be the fancy version
My thought was simply to make grouping unavailable when a selected card is in another group (grouping must be removed first) - but whatever works best or is more consistent with your idea of UX/UI
Itâs not clear how far this current iteration will go. It doesnât sound like weâll be able to give groups a name. That is fine, but I hope whatever you do implement doesnât preclude or obstruct us from getting that in the future.
@sts Iâm curious about your use case here. It sounds like you want a way to group cards because you want to keep cards in a group relatively positioned. You said itâs âtoo easy to pull a card out of context by mistakeâ. Presumably, if you the bunch of cards were grouped, pulling on one card would move all the other ones in the same group along with it. Is that what you were thinking? What are other use cases you have in mind for grouping?
I donât understand this. Without a visual indicator on cards in a group, I donât see it being very valuable to group cards. Also, this doesnât meet one of the initial design goals (which may have now changed) from this thread, which says âbe able to see whatâs in a group upfrontâ.
Will groups work multiplayer? If so, I guess collaborators can define/change groups?
What youâre currently describing sounds more along the lines of a saved selection. Itâs more a feature that lets you more easily move a group of cards, rather than give that group of cards semantics. Is that how you see it?
Letâs say I setup a kanban board (cards representing tasks, and moving them spatially from To Do, In Progress, Done). Would grouping make this easier at all? What if the To Do column is a group? How easy would it be for me to move a card from To Do to In Progress (change a card from one group to another)?
Weâre conflating semantics and I think we need to establish two seperate terms:
Groups: analogous to cmd-g/cmd-shift-g in design software. Primary Goal = move a bunch of cards together without having to select them each time (This is what @sts is referring to). Functionally, but clunkily, currently accomplishable with tags: [planning] Card Grouping
Lists: analogous to lists in trello. A visually distinct vertical collection of cards with an named association. (This is what @bentsai is referring to)
Both of these can co-exist, if necessary.
ETA:
That said, donât expect either in the near term because both have a high difficulty to usage ratio:
difficulty = time to implement, amount of new ui, number of expected edge cases, degree of server data model changes usage = how many people will use, expect, or need this.
Both lists and groups are high difficulty/low-expected-usage and so will come later on (after other improvements with lower difficulty/higher-expected-usage.
The argument for lists has already been thoroughly made.
That said, I would like more information on the use-cases for cmd-g groups in kinopio
The distinction between lists and groups makes sense. I agree that visual and semantic grouping are not mutually exclusive,. On the contrary - semantics are very often expressed by visual proximity or cohesion.
Well, my use case is clustering / grouping cards so that I can rearrange groups of cards more easily.
Letâs say we have a space âMy Healthâ, with âcard clustersâ like âFoodâ, âSleepâ, âExerciseâ, âMindâ etc. and each of these clusters has many cards in them or around them in all kinds of different arrangements. Rearranging these clusters in a space right now involves drawing over all of the cards and then dragging the selection to a new place. This quickly becomes cumbersome and error-prone with many cards, especially if they are not aligned in a specific way.
Hence the desire to âgroupâ
I understand if this isnât something Kinopio was meant for - as a newbie I made my own mental model of what this thing âisâ and what it could be useful for. I guess I see it as some kind of âvery free form mindmapâ and I could be absolutely wrong .
Just going to throw my vote out their for lists > groupingâŚ
If groupings main goal is to move cards together, this can be handled today with connections and cmd+click to easily highlight a specific group of connected cards. (And yes I know people may use connections differently and connect a card in a âgroupâ to a card outside that âgroupâ, which breaks this, but itâs still doable if thatâs truly a priority for a user in a space).
To play devils advocate against myself, lists are also possible with the align buttons today, which I make great use of in most of my spaces, but Iâd argue maintains a list today (rearrange, highlight cards, re-align) is more finicky than maintaining a âconnectedâ group (adding / deleting a connection).
@sts welcome to Kinopio, your feedback is very valuableâthanks for sharing.
Iâm wondering for this use case, if you have a cluster already (âFoodâ, âSleepâ, etc), and you want to rearrange cards internally, wouldnât grouping make this harder? Because moving a grouped card moves the whole group, so you would have to ungroup the card, move it, then re-group it. (This isnât just a question for @sts, but more broadly).
If this is how itâs implemented, I feel like grouping would make moving cards around more cumbersome.
I appreciate the clarity of your thinking between groups and lists. I want to add some nuance because I think thereâs overlap and an additional concept.
Easily-move-card-cluster: The most recent proposal whose goal is to move a bunch of cards more easily. Ability to recall a selection. This is not trying to apply any semantics to the cluster.
Semantic grouping: This is broader than lists (below). The goal is to apply semantics to a cluster of cards. To use @sts example, I might have a personal space with a groups for âfoodâ, âexerciseâ, âmindâ. Another example is, I might have a space for a class Iâm taking. I would have a group of cards for lecture notes from week 1, week 2, etc. We currently can do this informally by arranging cards close together. We can apply semantics by using connections to each card. But connections are not as precise semantically or visually. There are other non-semantic ways to do this: creating and locking a big image card that you put other cards on top of, use card coloring for a group.
Lists: I see lists as a specific instance of semantic grouping, and a more granular concept. With lists, you lose the 2D spatiality of cards. It is a much stricter, tighter relationship with linearity and ordering. But what you gain is, easy to change order, move around, treat a cluster of cards as a single idea. I see this all the time in my and othersâ spaces. Anyway, @pirijan notes âThe argument for lists has already been thoroughly made.â so Iâll stop there
Yeah, that would actually make rearranging cards within a group a little more involved.
But I would then probably just not group cards that need to be rearranged often
As for the general design goals, I didnât mean to stir up a hornetâs nest or question anything youâve been discussing here for a while. Sorry if I came across that way
No apologies needed, itâs a long discussed topic and more view points and opinions are always welcome and encouraged. And based on the notes above, at least itâs helped Pirijan gain additional clarity for what people want and expect
My POV, if the default behavior for moving a card in a group always moved the whole group, Iâm not sure Iâd use it. While I have cards grouped in my head, in my experience (for my use case), I still move individual cards within the group by themselves far more than large groups of cards together. The extra effort to move a large group I think matches the frequency (for me), especially with boxed shift-selecting, given that grouped cards are typically close together without other cards mingled in.
If I did have a group of cards with other cards mixed in, I struggle to see why Iâd move the group of cards without the minglers because youâd lose the spatial relationship of the minglers if they were there mingling with a purpose to begin withâŚ
Thanks for the feedback, good points were raised and it sounds like doing the harder thing: âlistsâ, will cover more use-cases that donât currently have an alternate way to do.
I renamed the thread from âcard groupsâ to âcard listsâ, bc the latter term is less ambiguous.
Q: if you can freehand draw on a space, would just drawing a box on the background of the space accomplish 80% of what formal lists would do? If so, a drawing tool certainly sounds like a more universally approachable/appreciable feature.
I echo what @kordumb said. I think freehand drawing would be cool, and it would help with the use case of, âI want to designate an area for people to put stuffâ, esp in a multiplayer setting.
But lists would really up the experience in a lot of new ways. People are creating lists already, so improving that interaction would go a long way