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 ;-) )
~m
On 12/11/2009 06:18 AM, 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.
I agree, this left navbar takes a lot of precious space, at the top-left, where is the most important area of a page (the spot where you are looking first).
However, I am unsure about making it sliding, I expect in the collapsed form it will be very hard to discover, so few people will notice it. How about moving it at the top?
- It seemed the majority of users in the usability tests did not even
note the tabs going across the top.
I suspect this is because they are not always there, they appear only on some pages (like in package details), after the user got an idea what is the general layout of the website.
- 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)
I find 'after1' to be very intrusive, the large blue area draws my attention away from the content of the page and the 'after2' to be blocky and ugly (still I like its way to describe the package at the top of the left sidebar). I still think 'before' is the most elegant and pleasing to look at.
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?
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