Block editor usability improvement: Greater visibility to block parent container options when child block selected

[LukaszJaro]

Discussed in #64719

^{Originally posted by LukaszJaro August 22, 2024}
Hi, I wanted to share recent experience I had when I was helping a technical writer accomplish a task in the block editor.

Tech writer was attempting to break a numbered list with a paragraph and then continue the list while maintaining the proper order of the list and not starting from 1 again. They were able to successfully break the list but had great difficulty finding the start value to increment the list even with using the list view. I noticed they had the list item selected, in order to get the start value input to display in the settings panel you have to select the parent container of the list block to see that option. I tried to explain this over email with images but still took a while to understand that concept. Once finally figured out, they mentioned, "they would of never guessed that".

Then I thought to myself I run into this issue often as well, just kind of a forgetful thing, "right I have to be in the parent container to see more options". So this applies to all child blocks with parent containers.

So I thought, for example in the list block, when child block is selected, in the settings panel header(card title and description) you see "List item" and "Create a list item." What if we can somehow throw in the option to select the immediate parent container in the section as well which somehow states their is more options? Each child block would have the option to keep moving up to it's container block via the settings panel header. I noticed tech writer was scouring the settings panel trying to find the option, so I think this is a good high visibility area for this.

And I literally just discovered that there is a button in the toolbar "select parent block" that traverses upwards until into their is no more parent containers. But, it has low visibility and does not hint that there is further options by selecting the parent container.

I'm not sure how to present/design this exactly but I think the settings panel very top is a section to put it, example, could be just simple link that does same thing as the toolbar parent button or a drop down option, etc.

This is the image showing the confusion: