The categories section needs some sort of visual way to quickly tell if a category is collapsed or expanded. Perhaps “expanded” categories have their text in a slightly heavier font, or maybe “collapsed” categories are a gray font instead of white?
No matter the solution, it needs something.
Anyone else think this is a need? If so, what are your thoughts for a potential solution?
I’ve just played with collapsing and expanding categories. The difference is really clear to me: expanded categories have a list of projects underneath!
You’re assuming that a category has a project under it. What happens when a category has no projects or has has its projects archived? Or what if you’re between projects for a given category?
True! In my case I very rarely move projects between categories and never have an empty category.
Archived projects also appear as an entry in the list as an “Archived” item, so you would still see something in the category in that case.
It’s true that an empty category probably is hard to distinguish, but I assume few people keep around empty categories, and in the rare occasion they do, they probably know it. It’s also true that whether an empty category is expanded or collapsed makes no difference.
Perhaps it seems a bit petty to not just include a visual indicator, but this can have a dramatic effect on how “cluttered” the interface feels. If you imagine every category has some icon on it to show whether it is collapsed or not, it starts to get much busier, and you don’t really gain much in the trade, because most of the time it is clear if a category is collapsed anyway. (Only the empty case is not completely clear.)