Redesign long side control panel to improve usability

[joverlee521]

Context

With each new feature that we add to Auspice, we usually add corresponding controls for it in the side control panel. This has resulted in the side control panel becoming way too long to the point that it impedes usability. We should redesign the long control panel to improve usability.

Possible solution

The team has discussed this in conversations in the past, but I don't think we've ever officially decided on a new design. Some ideas we've discussed in the past:

• Move some core controls to the top of the main panel
• Make collapsible sections in the control panel
• Add "normal" + "expert" modes to the panel, where "normal" is a simplified version and "expert" includes all controls

[victorlin]

I think a very broad goal would be to reduce the amount of clicks/scrolling/eye-scanning necessary across various use cases.

A couple more ideas (both these can fit with the "collapsible sections" idea):

Related items should be close together

This is mostly implemented with the per-panel sections, but a few other ideas:

1. Move the animation options to be under the date slider.
2. Move the toggles for showing/hiding panels to be under each panel section.

Conditional rendering

This is implemented in some places already. For example, turning off a panel will hide panel-specific options (except for tree, might be a bug).

It could be expanded to more than just panels, for example the animation buttons + options could live directly under a new "animation on/off toggle", and only shown when that is toggled on.

[emmahodcroft]

It might be cool (if not too laborious) to store settings for either all builds or specific builds. If one uses a specific panel quite a lot you could leave it expanded knowing it stays that way when you come back later, whereas others could remain collapsed. (I feel like I toggle full/panel view a lot, but only rarely use the build selectors at the top, usually using direct URLs, for example).

[joverlee521]

If one uses a specific panel quite a lot you could leave it expanded knowing it stays that way when you come back later, whereas others could remain collapsed.

This would definitely be useful! This aligns with the idea that we implement "user settings" as suggested in #1574

[rneher]

Another option would be to include some some controls in the individual panels.
We have this for the entropy panel. Similarly, the tree layout could be little icons in the tree. We already have the zoom/layout buttons there. Normalize frequencies could also be in the frequency panel. The side bar could be reserved for things that span multiple panels.