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Provide user feedback in empty panes #11

@isabela-pf

Description

@isabela-pf

Several panes in Spyder might have no content until the user does a specific action. Right now, most of these panes look like empty rectangles without any explanation for why they are empty, so users could easily think there is an error, that they have done something that interrupted the pane’s function, or that it is loading very slowly.

It’d be a better experience if Spyder is transparent about two things:

  1. What is happening to make the pane empty (for example, no plots generated yet in the Plots pane)
  2. What can users do to make the pane function (like run the Editor with plot-generating code)

There’s a few different ways we can solve this lack of feedback, but it should have a visual relationship or similar approach and feel to the work on a combined Help pane’s “home” as shown in #9 since they are both in-pane messages (though that is more of an index of help options than an empty pane).

A few notes about these mockups:

  • While there are multiple panes that need this treatment, I am showing mockups with the Plots pane only since I’m exploring general directions for now.
  • I'm not spending time putting in the pane's toolbars for now, though they should still be there.
  • I want to iterate on the messages and make sure they are accurate. These are rough ideas.

Option 1

This one matches the Help pane work almost exactly. I don’t think it is the strongest approach visually, but if we want the panes to match exactly this might be the direction to explore.

3

Option 2

This is the next closest to the Help pane work, but a little more balanced for the space.

4

Option 3

Here I started to explore if there was something useful an empty pane could do on top of communicating basic states of the pane to users. In this iteration, the empty pane messages are accompanied by a list of imported visualization packages so users can know what they could be generating plots from before they have even done it. I’m not sure if tracking visualization package imports is a useful or technically feasible idea (Does the Plots pane even know what is happening in the Editor before it is run?). It’s here for review anyways, and I’d appreciate the feedback. Maybe a different set of useful plot-related information fits here instead?

13

Option 4

This option has the least in common with the Help pane reworking, but breaks up the already text-heavy Spyder UI with a simple illustration of what the pane can look like when it has content. It is also the furthest from anything that currently exists in Spyder UI, though there aren’t any comparable messages that I’m aware of.

12

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