On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:18:06PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
So the Fedora Community navigation is going to need some rethinking.
I
haven't yet written up the usability test results but there was
definitely a lot of confusion shown through the tests - and we weren't
really 100% happy with it to start:
- The left nav tabs take up precious screen real estate, yet they are
top-level global nav and thus are not used as often as other navigation.
- It seemed the majority of users in the usability tests did not even
note the tabs going across the top.
- Many users in the tests also did not realize the right sidebar
secondary nav (1) was even there (2) if they saw it, they didn't think
it was related to the center content (eg nav for package details)
At FUDcon in Toronto this past weekend I showed the navigation to Diana
and we had a discussion about it, and she showed me some UI she has
worked on that I think is a great inspiration for making the Fedora
Community navigation a whole lot better to work with.
On the FUDbus back home I started trying some of her ideas -on the left,
the nav bar could slideback and slide out on demand, and I tried making
the right navbar look more 'navigation-y' rather than like it is little
ads or something not relevant to the content.
I've attached my inkscape mocks (I can't uplaod them to the wiki at the
moment because of the outage) - what do you think? (WARNING: these are
way rough and were done on a bus ;-) )
My untrained observations:
* Getting the left navbar out of the way is smart. The cramped middle
area can breathe a bit more now.
* The expanding navbar is a good way to solve this, but I think it
needs to be more apparent it's a menu. Can it be labeled with text,
even vertically-oriented if needed to save space, to achieve that
purpose? I've noticed sites using an expanding element for
comments, where the expander is labeled "Give us Feedback" or "Make
a Comment," and it's apparent what the element is for. I'm not sure
how to label properly in this case, though.
* In the SVG, I think the third option (i.e. the second "after"
version) makes it clearer that what I'm seeing in the main area
comes from a specific choice I've made on the right. Do you think
that mental connection might be even easier if the choice on the
right has a sort of figurative arrow shape on its left side,
pointing to the middle area? I tried my hand, but please excuse the
crummy alignment and my failure to get angles correct:
http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/images/mockups/fcomm-with-arrow.png
* What differentiates the expanding navbar from the choices at the top
in this third mockup? Is the idea that the page tabs at the top are
kind of a sub-grouing of what the expanding navbar provides, and the
things on the right are completely contextual with whatever you're
viewing in the middle?
--
Paul W. Frields
http://paul.frields.org/
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