I love the new snippets feature! I am sure there has been a ton of work put into it, as it shows from the design.
I have a few items of feedback about the feature, and I hope that this forum is the right place to mention them.
Here’s what the snippets menu looks like for me on my primary device ( Laptop )
And here’s the “new notebook” dialog that was also recently added:
I am showing both of them because I want to give some feedback about the Snippets feature in relation to an already existing dialog on Observable.
- If you notice in the “new notebook” dialog - the header persists when you scroll. In the Snippets dialog, the handy search box scrolls away as soon as you start moving down. Can you make the search box area a “sticky header” that persists as you scroll. ( An example here How To Create an On Scroll Fixed Header ) This is especially relevant to us laptop users who will have to scroll a lot
- When you get to a group, say “inputs” can you also make that “sticky” until you scroll away from that section. Again, see the example above. I scroll through “inputs” and the header stays under the search box so that the “docs” link will persist. But as I scroll away to “Plot” it then becomes the “sticky header” with it’s docs.
- The Docs link(s) should open in a new tab. I’ve had many times that I want to see the docs for the snippet, but then my work was blown away because the link pointed to the same window.
- There’s no “close” x on the snippets panel ( I see this is also the case for all the sidebar panels ) but this is inconsistent with the “new notebook” dialog which does have a close x. Clicking outside the panel doesn’t dismiss it either like the “new notebook” does. So for a few seconds I’m at a loss as to how to dismiss this panel. I finally realized the sidebar buttons are toggles, but there’s no change in the UI for me to understand this if I’m a new user. Perhaps Change the Icon I clicked from it’s icon to an “X” ?
( The Blue chart icon – maybe make it an X when it’s selected ) Or at least add an X so folks can quickly make use of prior learning with other dialogs to dismiss the sidebar.
