Not seeing button to expand left-panel cryptic icons to show names

[Dave Sky]

I'm not a fan of squeezing away the names of buttons to show arbitrary icons that may or may not make sense to me or that I may not remember.

I remember there being a button at the bottom that when clicked expanded the panel to show the button names... but it's not there, and I'm looking at Bitbucket Cloud in Chrome on Mac in an expanded window and scrolling shows nothing.

[Ana Retamal · Accepted solution]

Hi Dave! The button has been replaced by an arrow that will be displayed when you approach the left panel:

Can you see it? Alternatively, you can place your cursor on the blue line and drag it to the right to expand the menu. Let us know if you need further assistance!

Best regards,

Ana

[Dave Sky]

OK I do notice that the mouse cursor changes to a drag cursor on the blue/white edge separator, which also causes an animated line/arrow to appear... I honestly don't need to use the line/arrow, just the mouse drag cursor (I'm on a Mac though, not sure if it's different on Windows).

However, this is not a good way to do this... this option should be obvious on the screen, not reliant on just hovering over an edge where dragging is something inherent to OS windows not webpage sections.

The expand button before was good enough and better even though it also wasn't quite obvious at first how to bring the button names back.

The current behavior is what's called "false simplicity"; while a developer or designer may think it "simplifies" the interface or makes it "clean" or "beautiful", it actually prevents intuitive or obvious ways to interact with the interface.

Specifically it's an Ambiguous UI issue like what's described here: https://baymard.com/blog/false-simplicity