All, While working (last night) on the new fortress bootstrap design, I formed my personal opinion ;-). Please note that I'm an outsider, and have no knowledge of the domain. So on the one hand it is nice to have a fresh look, on the other it means I may not know jack.
First as an outsider, the main menu items don't mean anything to me . This does make it harder to find my way around the application, or even guess its main purpose (to change things, but what? The sheer number of menu items makes it hard to put it in a menu bar (navbar [1]). A subcategorization or a drop down menu would make it fit better. But that means knowing how to group items logically. The main user interface has a master-detail with roughly 4 parts: - a list view for all items - a side panel with sliding windows - an info panel - a nav panel The top menu is replicated in the nav panel, I suggest dropping the nav panel as the menu lives on top as well. The info panel is AFAICS used as a feedback panel for displaying messages that bubble up during working with the UI. The side panel with sliding windows is updated upon selecting an item from the list view. The user interface is incredibly dense, and has a real power user feel to it. However, it didn't dawn on me that the sliding windows contain more information. These parts are often off-screen, especially when you open up one of the lower panels. In my experience over the years, using AJAX for major interactions is adding complexity to the workload of the developer for little gain for the user. We have built singe page applications using Wicket, and have regretted all of them. In most applications I develop we split selecting the item from the actual editing of the item in separate pages. This frees up screen real estate for the editors of the item, and gives more room for the list view to allow for better filtering. In my view I suggest to have either: - Xs page (shows list of items of type X) - X detail page (shows details of item of type X, allows for direct editing) or - Xs page (shows list of items of type X) - X detail page (shows details of item of type X) - X detail edit page (allows editing of item of type X) The former is less code, the latter allows for easily separating the necessary rights for editing Xs from viewing Xs. So my questions are: - can you provide a list of hierarchical menu items that make it easier to group them into top/dropdown menu items? - are you willing to move from the master-detail on one screen paradigm to a separate screen for different purposes paradigm? - if so, which one of the two proposed navigation structures would you consider (I can implement both for a limited use case so you can try out) Thanks! Martijn [1] http://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/navbar/
