First, I want to thank the Wappler team and community.
It seems to me that it was very important to get rid of unnecessary elements in Server Actions. This was done and this is awesome!
At the same time, in terms of design, there is something to discuss and to improve. I agree that the final visual is too boxed and slightly awkward.
But it’s easy to fix. Here’s what I would suggest changing.
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I think the ‘then’ and ‘else’ blocks look better on top of each other than on the side. It is inconvenient to run your eyes from left to right and back. And the fact that to open and hide the ‘else’ block you need to click in different places of the screen, is confusing. Also, as already mentioned, it becomes too messy when there are many conditional blocks.
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I think there is no need to highlight the parent node. An arrow is enough to see and understand that the node can be collapsed or expanded.
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Vertical panel ‘exec, else, then’ could be less distracting. We could make the text and background of it darker and also remove icons.
Also, I think there is no need to collapse/expand ‘exec, else, then’ individually. It is better without additional arrows.
And I find it is easy to read text from the bottom up. -
It seems to me that it is better to get rid of the accumulation of visual layers on the right and below of the tree. If possible, of course.
The result will look something like this. It seems to me that this is accurate and convenient.
But if it still too boxed, there is an option where ‘exec, else, then’ are taken out of the box boundaries.
But I still prefer the variant, where the vertical panel is used for arrows.
I consider it better, because the current alternation of arrows and empty spaces make it a little harder to read the sequence of the nodes. I explained it here.
Also, sometimes there are no arrows at all and there is empty space to the left of the nodes, not ok.
So, proposed layout will look like this.
Yes, this version still turns out to be a bit boxy, but I personally like it the most.
PS: Just a reminder, that all my layouts could be found here in Figma.