Navigate UI Feedback

I took another look at navigate and here are my top issues with the UI, in no particular order:

A. Make the main navigate menu itself easier to access.

1. Seeing the cool animation that slides my whole site over is cool to watch a few times, but after a while it just becomes annoying to click one extra time. I would rethink the hiding functionality and see if the same effect can be achieved without a click. Maybe a drop-down or something where you mouse over to the edge of the screen and it appears.

2. The other issue here is that I have to not only click, but click on a fairly small icon in one corner.

3. This is minor, but in the help it says “Press CTL+SHIFT+S to focus on the search bar, even if Navigate is hidden.” – in firefox actually ctrl + shift + S renders the page with no style sheets if you have web developer toolbar enabled. It does not seem to work in native IE 7 either.

B. Make the menus in the menu widget easier to access and use.

4. My admin links are sometimes 3 links deep, which I can get to in my nice-menu or admin menu in 3 mouseovers and 1 click compared to navigate which takes 3 clicks to expand the little plus sign and another to click the link. I think doing a mouse-over is usually easier than clicking, and it is just a fundamental benefit of a drop down.

5. The other problem of having an expand icon is what happens when you expand an item and then move to another item – that item stays open, filling the precious vertical space that navigate requires. I am running 1920x1200 resolution, yet opening 3 menus filled the entire real estate, so in order to reclaim that space and explore more menu items, I would need to click 3 more times. I would look at windows explorer as an example of a folder system, and in that case it makes sense to have an expand menu, because there are few folders, and each contain many items, yet in this case folders (menus) and contents (more menus) all occupy the same space, and it quickly gets crowded. This makes exploring harder and slower.

C. Clean up the appearance.

6. I am not a designer, but I know I do not like blue / black / white / green. I would recommend picking a new color palette, there is a great site at http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes which may help

7. Quick inspection of CSS has fonts all over the place, I was able to find 20, 18, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8px, I would recommend toning it down to a few sizes and colors, drop italic and bold except where absolutely necessary

8. Remove any unnecessary elements, such as images/input-bg.png on search (which at least one other text box lack, main navigate settings).

9. I would also consider removing some of the options, or at least moving them to another page. The functionality is great, but I think too many options are presented to the user, too many possible open/closed states - for instance for widgets could close and combine be merged into one pane? It is not clear what KEY does without reading help either, or if that is necessary.

10. I would bucket how users are using navigate into two use cases: configuring navigate and navigating with navigate. Separating these is important in the UI design. An example of is the favorites widget which takes up space showing both the add favorites box (configuring navigate) and your favorite links for clicking (navigating navigate).

Overall, navigate is a nice module, but it is not slick enough usability-wise for me to recommend it. Favorites and search are all nice enhancements to something like admin menu but at the end of the day I can get all the same information in lots of different ways already. It is just a matter of which is easier to use, and in this case a dropdown menu are a better experience.

This module is duplicating other functionality, so I think it will be a fair amount of work to make it stand out. I do think the combination of these navigation features have a lot of potential, especially pre-set menus based on a users role and custom widgets. If you can fix some of these issues I think you could expect to see a spike in usage.

Good luck with the module, and thanks for contributing to Drupal!