Single State for Project Visibility Status

[cycomachead]

I think we need to clean up the states for what's public/published. Calling @jmoenig and @brianharvey to this discussion.

The backend has 2 booleans, but there's really only 3 states.

• Private
• Shared
• Published

In the front-end we currently use 2 icons to communicate state (a link and an eye), each which has a true and a false state. This makes it harder to tell the state of a project at a glance.

Additionally, changing the state of a project from published to private (or vice-versa) requires 2 clicks.

I propose that in the UI we go to 3 states, each which has a unique icon:

• Private, a closed solid lock
• Shared, perhaps the link, but there's reason for something else.
• Published, an eye -- perhaps a globe

In most places, I think the icon and the text should go together, except for grids.
In places where all projects are published, I think we could consider dropping the status, but that's a separate issue.

To share a project, I think we should have a modal which lets you pick a setting, and can offer explanatory text. I'm attaching a google drive share modal as one such example. It could also be a customized dropdown menu.

There's a few reasons we should do this:

• 1 status is much more clear and much less cognitive load to figure out what's going one.
  • 2 booleans means you have to think about what the combo means to determine what's actually happing
• Groups (Icons + Text) are easier to use
• All this also is important in terms of general accessibility requirements.

There's two issues still:

• Name of the 3 states.
• The icon for "shared via link" is naturally a link, but that means we can't use link icon for anything else, like a button that shows you the link to a project or something similar.

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[jmoenig]

I like this proposal, Michael! I agree that the transition from 2 states to 3 often happens by introducing another Boolean, but UI-wise we want to present it as the 3 states we actually want to make available. The implicit technically valid 4th state "NOT shared BUT public" doesn't make sense.

[bromagosa]

Good points, Michael. I agree.

Unfortunately, I won't have time to work on this until after the week-long MicroBlocks residency starting on Monday, but I don't believe we're going to release anytime soon anyway...

[brianharvey]

I agree too. The globe for published is good. Maybe we should steal Google's icon for link sharing, which uses the link but isn't just the link, so it can be distinguished from a link icon alone. And the lock for private is fine. And private/shared/published is ok for names, with the advantage that our current users don't have to unlearn "shared" for link sharing.