Expectation of multi-select and opening in an app is not clear

[lynwilhelm]

It is not very clear that you can't open multiple files in an application.

Is there ever a case where we will support this? (i.e. a segmentation file and raw file at the same time)

One option is to have slightly different menu options available based on single or multi-file selection. Another option is to maybe show the filename somewhere in the menu (like above "Open with").

Not sure I have a grasp on all the potential use cases here though!

[lynwilhelm]

@SeanLeRoy I am not sure if this is a real issue for users. My concern is based on my own assumptions. Do you have a process for triaging insights like this when you are choosing to wait and see if users mention it in the future? This is what my "UX research repo" was meant to do but we weren't able to successfully incorporate it into our development process (yet).

[SeanLeRoy]

Not an explicit one - I close out issues like this where we aren't actually sure if it is worth doing due to no specific impetus & re-open them if it comes up again

[lynwilhelm]

Close it!

[SeanLeRoy]

Closing until we hear from users this is important

[toloudis]

Specifically for opening multiple files in VolE:
Cameron is going to work on a proof of concept of this very thing, motivated by Antoine and the new multi-scene loading capability we added to VolE. But he is going to hook it up via the export-csv feature and it's going to be a prototype / implementation test to see if we can do it at all. We hope to prove out the key technical problem (sending largeish csv data between the two web apps) and then demo to one or two test users..
allen-cell-animated/vole-app#360

[SeanLeRoy]

@toloudis Just checking in in case me closing this out was sending the wrong message. BFF already does do some multi-select sending of files when we know the viewer can handle that (ex. FIJI/ImageJ) so once/if VolE can accept more than one file in some format then we can toss those at it too. This issue was really tied to visual feedback for the user or lack thereof when it comes to whether or not BFF is or can send multiple files to the viewer. I closed this out after chatting a bit with Lyndsay that we aren't sure how confusing it is for any users at the moment so we don't really have a driver for this feature yet. If you think it is confusing then perhaps that is our impetus though.

[toloudis]

no problem here, and I'm fine with closing this. I just happened to notice and wanted to give extra info about the related work we are going to do soon