Thank you all so much for your feedback. After reading your feedback, we have made a few iterations internally and would like to share where we have landed. Check out the GIF:
User hovers, then selects an Excerpt macro while editing a page.
First and foremost, we want to make clear that we will roll out these changes gradually to customers while closely monitoring macro usage metrics & qualitative user feedback to ensure our changes impact macro adoption positively, not negatively (in which case we would iterate on our approach). Our current estimated timeframe to begin rolling these changes out to users is near the end of March 2024.
The core piece of feedback we heard was - due to a current lack of WYSIWYG ability for vendor macros (i.e. they can’t be interacted with in the editor, bodied macros which account for ~6% of all macros look very different in the editor than the renderer), it may be difficult for users to understand what they are seeing if we make it so macro names and parameters are only visible on hover.
While we agree that having the name show can be useful for orienting oneself on the page, our ultimate goal is to make macros feel more modern and familiar, which we believe will increase their adoption in the long-run. So, we are following conventions of other content in Confluence pages (i.e. smart links, media, tables, etc), where users can hover and select elements to see more details about, interact with and configure them–and will not display macro names until users hover over the macro. Similarly, macro parameters will no longer be visible in the macro frame as they were already very limited as they displayed parameter keys in camel case (confusing to less technical users) and usually had most of their information truncated.
Icons will also no longer be visible in the macro frame, to maintain a consistent experience across macros as not all macros have custom icons. The larger 40px by 40px icon illustration that users can see in the browsing menu will continue to be available to help users recognize and distinguish macros.
Lastly, as it is a large theme in RFC-36: Live-Edit Pages in Confluence Cloud, we definitely plan to add more WYSIWYG functionality (e.g. interactivity in the editor) to vendor macros in the future that can help close the gap, and will share more details as they become available.
Some other questions asked with answers:
- Is accessibility an issue? As we’ve gone through internal design iterations, we’ve made sure to closely follow our accessibility guidelines to make sure that these updates are accessible.
- Does this affect the Macro Editor? Nope!
- What does it look like in dark mode? We plan to fully support dark mode, and can share imagery when it becomes available.
- Are the selected borders/states customizable? Not at this time.