[Design-team] Fedora Community navigation rethinking

[Nicu Buculei]

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.

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/