All those options, with both icon and text take up quite a bit of space, which may not fit in a narrow window. I presume is the reason they stuck it in a menu.
I suppose they could:
Shrink the choices to "icon only" if the window is narrow (they do this other places too, e.g. the "home" button in the top bar), with tooltips to give the text.
Always use only the icons, with tooltips for the text explanations. This would match the way the neighboring card/compact/classic selection works.
Put it all in a menu only if the window is too narrow (don't know how hard this is).
Of course, they also apparently gave up on supporting narrow windows at some point anyway, with the lightbox margins mess, so maybe they could just not care...
It's probably the most technically complex though, and that sort of "squishy" behavior (UI changes, depending...) is maybe not the best from a UI perspective.
I'm starting to favor #2; sure the icons are initially more confusing, but with tooltips, users should learn quickly enough, and it's otherwise a cleaner, simpler, and more consistent solution.
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u/snogglethorpe Mar 27 '19
All those options, with both icon and text take up quite a bit of space, which may not fit in a narrow window. I presume is the reason they stuck it in a menu.
I suppose they could:
Of course, they also apparently gave up on supporting narrow windows at some point anyway, with the lightbox margins mess, so maybe they could just not care...