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Comment by bretthopper | Hacker News Reader

The new "sheets" UI paradigm is strange to me. Jason mentioned a few times that they wanted to provide focus by getting rid of unnecessary design elements and chrome. But with the sheets, you actually get unneeded chrome. Your main content viewport keeps getting shifted down and to the right.

Why not just use breadcrumbs at the top to provide context? That way, the entire content area could be taken over whenever you click on a link which would be much simpler.

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When you use it you'll see why breadcrumbs are inferior. Breadcrumbs don't give you a sense of place. Breadcrumbs aren't natural. It sounds like a subtle thing, but once you use it you'll see the difference. Also, sheets have a much larger click target which makes them a lot easier and faster to use.

The only purpose of breadcrumbs is to provide a sense of place. It literally tells you where you are and how you got there. And where you can easily navigate back to.

In terms of being natural, they definitely don't map to a physical analogy like your sheets do. But that's a good thing to me.

edit: I agree with the click target benefit. Although I think you could do some useful things design wise with breadcrumbs to achieve a lot of what you guys did with sheets.

If you want to get semantic, breadcrumbs don't really give you a "sense" of place, they just tell you where you've come from. These sheets actually make you feel how many levels deep you are—without having to parse a string.

Curious to hear what you think once you use it. Looking at something and using it are two very different things.

Couldn't agree more. Part of my initial reaction is also just me rebelling against the trend of using physical world analogy's to solve modern UI problems. Although at least the sheets are actually useful unlike Apple's skeuomorph UIs (see: iCal).

The first thing I thought of was how sheets are like the real world and how that makes things so much more easier to use (if done right). I'm not sure why you like to rebell against using physical world analogies? Specially for less tech savy users this gives them a better chance of understanding how the interface works if they know how the object in real life works.

I think you could do some useful things design wise with breadcrumbs

I think moving beyond the > foo > bar style of breadcrumbing is actually a big deal. who else has even tried?

My first impression was that the "sheet" visual metaphor is brilliant. I'm all for physical-world-based visual metaphors when they can be implemented well, ie. not overly obtrusive and well balanced. In addition, if the the performance is as good as it seems in the video when multiple sheets are overlayed -- that's very impressive as well. I'm very curious how it was implemented.

Previously I haven't preferred Basecamp but this new version is looking great so far.

In addition to the bigger click target, I appreciate that more information can be included in the still-visible section of each sheet. Each page in a breadcrumb trail is limited to a word or two of context, but with sheets, there's room for titles and other useful info.

I am curious...to what extent does Chrome's Preferences section inspire you with this 'sheets' design? Horizontal navigation (clicking on the side) works pretty well in Chrome (including the back button). I assume that is the case with your design too?

A close button on the top right of the sheets would be nice. Its a common metaphor these days.

Otherwise the UI looks great.

If the little bit of document sticking out on the left is clickable, that would let you go "back" no matter how far down you had scrolled, which seems like a good feature.

We used to have it clickable, but we found it was fairly easy to click by accident so we turned it off. We may bring it back down the road once we have a little more time to focus on that interaction.

Seems like a glorified back-button to me.

It is. It's also one where you don't need to remember context.

Bret Victor describes and demos this in his presentation "Inventing on Principle." [http://vimeo.com/36579366]. BCX is better than a page-based back button. By the way, back still works.

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