RFC: Navigation restructuring

Aaron Weitekamp aweiteka at redhat.com
Tue Dec 4 15:14:59 UTC 2012


On 11/15/2012 07:57 PM, Jaromír Coufal wrote:
> Good morning/afternoon/evening to all
> (you can choose your time-zone)
>
> On our Aeolus Developer Conference I introduced new concept of Conductor
> UI. When I wanted to use versioning to distinguish it from current one,
> I realized that it would be better just to call it "new generation" :)
>
> With this e-mail I would like to follow up with more details to the
> first stage of our change - navigation restructuring.
>
> ====
> Goals
> ====
> - Make user oriented in the system
> - Allow user to quick navigate through the system
> - Show to user as much as possible within at least steps as possible
> (but don't overwhelm him)
> - Don't get user lost (at least not easily)
> - If user gets lost recover him fast
>
This is good stuff Jaromir. My only concern, as you alluded to, is it's 
a bit of a "start from scratch" approach. If we can do that, wonderful! 
But if it's too big a hill to climb then could we make these changes 
more iteratively?

I recently posted some possible approaches[1]. The concepts are much 
less specific than yours. (I'm not a designer!)
1. Is it really a navigation problem or rather not taking advantage of 
our table widget model? It seems we don't display enough information so 
we end up with many page views, therefore confusing the user. Your 
solution addresses this nicely and my proposal is to apply this 
throughout the site.
2. Clean up and consolidate permissions management
3. Remove monitoring redundancy
4. Clean up UI antipatterns

Regarding the "skin", could we not just update the design of how the 
current tabs are displayed and achieve the same results? For example, 
under Users we have tabs Users, User Groups and Permissions.

-Aaron
[1] http://blog.aeolusproject.org/rethinking-the-ui-part-1-actions-table/

> =====
> Solution
> =====
> -> Two level navigation
> * First tier = logical grouping of elements
> * Second tier = elements themselves in sections (all of them)
>
> - User always knows where he is (always highlighted item in 1st and 2nd
> tier).
> - Just by 3 clicks (listing through 1st tier), user can overview all
> accessible sections.
> - It takes just 2 clicks to get to any full list of elements (e.g. list
> of Images)
> - It takes just 3 clicks to get to any detail of any element in the
> system. (e.g. detail of an Image)
> - If user looks for some section, he knows he can always find it in 2nd
> tier (nowhere else).
>
> ======
> Structure
> ======
> *Cloud Environments*
> (everything related to active content)
>      - Overview
>      - Cloud Environments
>      - Resource Zones
>      - AppForms
>
> *Catalog*
> (everything related to passive content)
>      - Catalogs
>      - AppForm Outlines
>      - Images
>      - Hardware Profiles
>
> *Cloud providers*
>      - Cloud Providers
>      - Accounts
>      - Realms
>      - Provider Selection
>      - (Cost Estimates)
>
> *Users*
>      - User groups
>      - Users
>      - Permissions
>
> =====
> Concept
> =====
> - *Dashboard* will not be part of navigation. It is specific page with
> purpose to inform user about current state of system and what happened
> when he was out. User will mostly work with this page just after logging
> in not during further use of our system. This means, that Dashboard will
> be a launch (home) page right after login. It is common and very widely
> used usability feature, that logo brings you to homepage; in our case it
> wouldn't be different, logo will bring you back to Dashboard.
>
> - Under each item from the second tier is list of all its elements in
> table view
>
> - There is one exception - first page of Cloud Environemnts = Overview
> (currently will be substituted by Monitor page)
>
> ==========
> Implementation
> ==========
> Currently we are missing following table views:
> - Cloud Environments
> - Resource Zones
> - AppForms
> - AppForm Outlines
> - Provider Accounts
> - Provider Selection
>
> Other views are already implemented, so we can just relocate them with
> very small adjustments.
> (Details in link below Summary section)
>
> ======
> Summary
> ======
>
> Here is summary of the whole restructuring:
> http://conductor.jaromircoufal.cz/new_conductor-ui_navigation-restructuring.html
>
>
> Here is image for preview of the structure:
> http://conductor.jaromircoufal.cz/conductor_overview.png
>
> If you made it this far, I would be really thankful to any reaction -
> positive, negative, suggestions, if it makes sense to you, everything is
> really welcome.
>
> Looking forward to hearing from you
> -- Jarda
>



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