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Slides interface problem

I'm building an editor to create a structure of a page based on a full-screen vertical and horizontal slider.

A site is composed for vertical sections. Each of those can have 0 or a limited number of horizontal slides.

Now, I don't know how to create a proper interface to allow them to add more horizontal slides on the right side of the default slide by default.

Right now user add sections and slides by dragging from the panel on the right. The one in the middle is the "default slide" that will be visible when scrolling to that section. Then users will be able to navigate right or left depending on the side the other slides are in.

I'm limited to the space on the viewport and right now, I'm using scrollable right and left sides, so when you add more than 2 slides they won't fit in the viewport. So the way you can access them is by scrolling right or left inside that side of the section, but this doesn't seem right...

Any better ideas of how to deal with this issues?

Some that came to my mind:

  • Use an arrow on each row of slides. Click to slide right or left.
  • Make the whole element draggable. So user can navigate right or left by draging the whole structure and see the end of the row in any side.
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  • Do your users have additional interactions with the panels after they add them to the structure? Right now, each panel is kind of large, and I'm wondering if that's for a reason.
    – maxathousand
    Feb 3, 2020 at 19:40
  • Each panel will contain a preview of that section's theme. That's why :) And yes, they care re-order them and place them in another position within the section or between sections.
    – Steve
    Feb 3, 2020 at 21:05

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It depends... Can user identify slides if they are smaller? Is user going to work on this slides here, or is it just to edit connections?

Auto zoom out (auto fit? correct me if there is aright name for it) can be a good option. If slides have their names, then the user can identify them even from afar and you can always see everything. You can fit on the screens many many slides if they are small, just make sure that the title is always big enough. However it can be surprising for a user, and even unwanted, if he/she need to see the slides while working on them.

If you can't have a names on the slides, then they must stay as big as possible. An arrow with a label hoe mach panels are there of each side sound quite good. Dragging seems natural, but you can then accidently drag one of your slides and cause so much chaos. Scrolling seems better, but why not let whole area to scroll, so user can choose what he/she wants to focus on? You are trying to inform users which sliders are the central ones by blocking their position, but this block user view. Also when there isn't enough slides it looks like you can scroll that way too:

enter image description here I would suggest to be more blunt about the what it do. Like that: enter image description here Then you don't need to emphasize center slides.

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  • Thanks for the feedback Ada!! Slides will contain a thumbnail of a section "theme". So they can't be smaller. You said with my idea we are blocking users view, but how would your proposed solution solve that? Wouldn't it also be blocked?
    – Steve
    Feb 4, 2020 at 18:03
  • My concern with making the whole horizontal group of slides scrollable with the mouse wheel is that they might not be able to then scroll vertically the page. An arrow the scroll right or left would probably solve that tho.
    – Steve
    Feb 4, 2020 at 18:07
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    USers still can't see everything at once, but at last he/she can choose what to see. Eg. a user wants to see the slides in the right, it is more comfortable to see as many of them as you can at once. In current solution you can only see 2, if you allow the user to move screen (scroll or by any other means) then user can see all 4 of them.
    – Ada
    Feb 9, 2020 at 17:17
  • About your scroll concern, you are right. I work on mac, so scrolling horizontally is easy for me. However if one is using mouse it is a bit problematic. Not all people know that in most programs you can scroll horizontally when pressed shift. For this who don't know you definitely need arrows, that would allow scrolling horizontally and vertically.
    – Ada
    Feb 9, 2020 at 17:20

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