First let me say that Matomo is fascinating software and I deeply appreciate the work that has gone into it.
There is one thing about the interface though, that won’t stop bothering me. It’s a design trope that I don’t know how got into fashion, but it’s extraordinarily difficult for those of us who don’t jive with it.
That’s the trope of making controls and actions disappear unless the mouse is hovered over some particular place.
I’m too new here to put in embedded images to show what I mean with pictures, but I’ll take a step-by-step example.
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I go to the dashboard and see the box “Visits Over Time” with a graph on it. There are no visible actions on it and no indication that it’s for anything other than displaying information.
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I accidentally hover with the mouse over it and only then discover that there are quite handy options right below the graph.
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Later I accidentally hover over the title of the box and discover even more options.
This means that while I’m learning how to use the software, I have to keep looking everywhere with the mouse as if I’m on some kind of treasure hunt.
I realize that many designers think that it’s cleaner to simply hide actions and options. But it really makes things difficult for some of us, especially beginners who are still trying to figure out how the software works.
Is there a way to disable this behavior so that icons and actions and such are simply always visible? It’s fine if they are differently colored, grayed out or more transparent or whatever, as long as they’re visible. Otherwise new users often feel like they’re constantly looking for a needle in a haystack, for absolutely no practical reason whatsoever.
I quickly looked through some code but quickly realized that this is not simply a CSS file somewhere that I might edit. Things seem a bit more complex than that, and I’m not familiar with the software framework that Matomo is written in. I wouldn’t mind editing code (I’m a programmer) but I also don’t want to spend hours trying to figure this out on my own if someone can just point out to me how to fix this.
Thank you in advance, and thanks again for a great piece of software.