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/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug _______________________________________________ design-team mailing list design-team@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
