Improve UI usability in Docker Desktop UI Container List View Action Buttons

[james-becker]

Tell us about your request
I have a UI/UX suggestion that would probably be trivial to implement but would make the user experience better.

Which service(s) is this request for?

Hi, I’m working in a microservices environment where we have about 18 microservices running in Docker. Most of us use Docker Desktop to interact with these services. On a regular basis, we will stop, start, and exec into running containers.

Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?

PROBLEM: On the right side of the Containers list, there are Action buttons. When my cursor is in this area, I know that I want to click an Action button. I do not want to click on the Container row itself, which would open into the Logs section of that Container. However, the Action Buttons are small circles. When you click just outside these circles, you end up the Container Logs view—a place you certainly did not want to be, because if you did want to be there, you’d just click on the Container row itself, which is right in your face and stretches across the window.

I suspect that 99% of users who click in the Actions area are trying to perform an Action, not navigate into the Container Logs view. Yet when a user is working fast, there tend to be many misclicks just outside the boundary of the Action buttons. These clicks take you to the Container logs view, and you have to navigate back to Container List view again, go back and click the button more accurately.

SOLUTION: I suggest that the area outside the Action Button Circles should have no cursor action when clicked. That, or the entire Cell in which the Action button is contained should perform the same command as the Action button itself. Users are often working very fast and shouldn’t need to slow down to bullseye the target of an Action Button.

[rimelek]

Although I have never noticed it, now I see it could indeed be improved. The same happens by the way when I run a compose project and I want to list the services in that project so I would click on the arrow icon between the checkbox and the compose project name. And that arrow is even smaller than the action buttons.