There are dozens of posts asking for the Scene Tab display to be improved. I’m adding my vote.
I love Sketchup, but the UI design is lacking in some key areas.
It’s understandable that most developers “write it like they see it” - if the display works fine in their test case, they don’t feel the need to complicate their life by adding options.
But what if you have a project with 100+ scenes?
What if your vision is less than perfect?
What if you have your desktop workstation with multiple monitors, but sometimes have to show the project on a laptop with a much smaller screen?
What if… you get the idea, there’s a ton of use cases.
One of the most important things in UI design is to “Remember The User”. And here’s the coolest part about designing an open-ended user experience - you don’t need to get it right 100% of the time!
Give your users OPTIONS, and THEY will craft a better experience for themselves.
(And they thank YOU for it.)
On that note, couple of suggestions / ideas for managing the wild herd of tabs that happens in large projects:
The current navigation solution of having a single button on the right side, that you have to click and hold FOREVER, sorry to say it, SUCKS.
1.) Option: make a vertical “flipper” or “accordion”:
(top row is visible on screen, others scroll into view if control is clicked… or mousewheel up/down when hovered over the area).
2.) Option: make a multi-row GRID so the user can choose which Scenes go in which order (as opposed to whatever mess is happening in the Scenes tray). If users want to organize by floor or by scene type, it should be THEIR call:
…and if the tab colors (background AND font) can be customized, it makes navigation even more intuitive:
3.) Option: make a pop-up (lightbox) “Page Sorter View” like CorelDRAW has - amazingly better way to navigate between even 100s of Scenes (Pages in Corel):
4.) Corel also has a Pages Docker. The same function could be accomplished by going to Window → New Tray and making a tray with just the Scenes in it, but I wish there were some options to customize the display (such as enable/disable the thumbnail preview updates, change thumbnail size, change font size, etc… not all of us have perfect vision).
And you can switch from single-page to multi-page, thumbnail to list, and resize thumbnails - all from the same interface:
).