Excessive scrolling in the Inspector

At this point, I consider Excessive scrolling to be the last major UX problem in X/Pro.
I feel that we scroll up and down too much in the Inspector. (Despite the Anchor tabs).

Let’s take the Headline element as an Example.

When I add in the text element, the first thing I want to do is adding the content. This is ok. the content Box appears on the top. (I could do this by double-clicking the element too, but it responds slower and I just feel it is faster and safer doing it in the Inspector).

Next thing I see is “Text Content Flexbox” These options are rarely used and are also confusing to many users as they “appear to do nothing”. It is not logical to put them as second important thing.

Next: Margin and Padding. These are important, but to reduce the scrolling depth, I would love to see them as tabs. Margin could be the front tab, and Padding could be next. Also, much lower is another one: “Text content Margin”. I would put that in this tab group too. Something like this:

Next: Border, Border Radius, Box Shadow. These three are great candidates for a single Tab group. (And it would be fantastic if there wasn’t default Box shadow. Me and many colleagues have to go in and remove it each time. Or save a preset without it). :slight_smile:

Next: Text forma and text shadow. I don’t see why these wouldn’t be another tab group.

I feel that this approach wold radically speed up the workflow. The key is to reduce the Scroll depth and to group and prioritize Options.

Hey Misho!

We feel you! There’s can often be more to scroll through than is needed. In the last beta cycle there was a proposal (I believe it was Devin) about adding a toggle in the control header. As it stands now, implementing this (screenshots to follow) is the most likely candidate for a solution.

Because most elements have zero margin by default, you would see Margin in the “off” state.

Enabling it would reveal the rest of the control and allow customizing the values.

While Inspecting any element, you would only see what you need. It’s still WIP since there are a couple things to iron out. It will some wrangling on the backend since we don’t have a way to track on/off right now per control. From a UX perspective, we need to solve how it works in horizontal mode, since it would still take up the 300px of space. We have some ideas there, perhaps if multiple sequential controls are “off” they could stack into one box.

We have this planned for the next cycle which includes more “workflow improvements” like being able to unsnap Layout, Elements, Inspector independently and move them around.

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