Adaptable Writing Room UI depending on content

[marcellothearcane]

It would be nice if we could make some changes to the slice UI depending on... something. For example, specifying the number of elements in a repeatable field, or which image variant gets shown by default.

Here's an example:

This will end up being a grid with four columns and square images (as you can see from the label).

It would be so cool if there was some way to specify the image variant to be the 'square' ones I have set up (along with landscape, portrait and original, and if it could specify how many images were shown alongside each other.

Also, it would be nice if there was some 'narrow' variant of the slice UI so we could select that and have less paddings and margin everywhere.

What do you think?

[Phil (Phil Snow)]

Hey Max,

This one got lost in the category.

I think this is a really cool idea, I would also like to see the writing room because more reactive and customisable like this.

It's not something that we are working on right now obviously, but I think with a lot of changes that we are making we'll start to make big changes in the writing room and the Slice Building experience.

Maybe @renaud has an opinion on your suggestion?

[marcellothearcane]

Hello @Phil

I saw an email with some promising news about slices, where they will have slice variations:

I suppose they are like labels, but with UI/content changes. Perhaps you could factor this in?

[renaud (Renaud Bressand)]

Hey, @marcellothearcane this is an interesting idea,

Slices variations are not really meant to change the UI. My main concern with allowing some control of the UI is that we are unsure of how this interface will look. The thing that is complex to handle is that if we allow this control, it will mean one person would have control of how it looks everyone else in the repo. I will use an example to illustrate the issue with that. This person might have a display that others don't have. So by customizing the grid let's say, he will configure it for him, like having 4 items on one row.

This could be an optimal experience for him but other won't be able to afford to have those 4 items in a row (because they have a smaller screen for example).

That's why we chose to adapt at the screen width, with responsive design. If we give this control to one person, everyone will rely on them to be the designer of the UI who has all Users in mind. We could think about how to make that available without breaking others users' experience, but this becomes a more complex subject.

There is a problem in terms of UI that we have to deal with also and that's the padding and margin that we have everywhere that is bloating a bit the UI, though I know very well that we should work on this. We'll try to see how we can improve this in the future.

I hope it makes sense
Let me know your thoughts.