Ok
I see two choices here: . Look & feel: tabbed menu (like your netlog example) or classic drop down menu's . Ordening Process driven vs. function driven We need to think about the use cases here. Tabbed menu's are good from the perspective from a process driven design, i.e. I'm now going for a weekly review, so I'd like to have relevant functions for that. For example you can make a 'tab' review with subitems Projects, Done, Tickler, Notes Or a tab 'Work' with subitems Home, Contexts, Projects. You can think of other tabs like Collect & Proces where there are subitems like Inbox, Collect (for the work you are doing) OTOH you can stick more to a functional approach where you have classic menus to pick the functions without a process as a context. You pick Projects when you need to do something with projects being review, work or collect&process. Since this approach is to find one function and not follow a workflow, classic submenus (where the submenu disappears after choosing a function) are fine here Ordening This follows of course from the process or function approach. Reinier Van: Dieter Plaetinck [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Verzonden: woensdag 20 augustus 2008 23:03 Aan: Reinier Balt CC: [email protected] Onderwerp: Re: [Tracks-discuss] reordening the main menu Reinier Balt wrote: I agree, the top bar gets filled. My first reaction would have been that we have much space on the right that we can use but after checking, some pages make use of that area heavily eg starred, feeds, tickler, home. and i like the little overviews they put there, so we should'n touch that. I agree. I personally use the right side bar to quickly navigate to active Project, so I do not specifically need a Projects link as a first level menu item, I'm fine with Manage->Projects We could maybe do a topbar with 'main categories' and 'sub items', and the sub-item links that are shown are dependent on the main category you're in. Do you mean sub menus? No, what I mean is basically two horizontal rows of links, one above the other. The top row contains the main sections (can be designed as tabs for instance) The 2nd row is a row containing the subitems, belonging to the main category. So when you go to another main category in the first row, another set of items is shown in the 2nd row For example the design of http://en.netlog.com/ demonstrates this (beware, when you are not logged in there, only the "Explore" main category will show a set of subitems) * search : personally i would just keep it simple and add the search form directly underneath the #minilinks block. The icon can be re- added later if we ever have an 'advanced search' feature. If we cleanup the menubar, there will be room for a search text field. The lack of room was one of the arguments why people did not like a search text box in the menu bar Oh.. Never had that issue as my screen is 1680 wide. I just checked and indeed, only at about 1280 pixels with enough space appears for a search form. Most people don't have this or higher widths so okay... (unless we can free up space by re-organizing the menu) * recurring actions : recurring actions are closely related to normal actions, I think we need 1 action manager, and inside that we should be able to make it recurrent or not Would be nice to reach that point, but until use cases are more clear I think we will needs recurring actions (although I think we should rename it to 'recurring patterns', but that is another topic) OK * feeds & stats: lets definitely keep the icons. these are special pages (just like advanced search) Why the icons and not put them in a submenu? Or do you mean both? No not both, that only leads to confusion. It's just that 3 icons is about as wide as 1 'main category' (link in menu). We should definitely try to organize stuff in a logical manner but if we have a select few items that would take as much space if we would put them as icons or in a new category then i would go for the icons, because they are easier/faster to reach then having to navigate to a submenu. Of course this assumes that 1) There are only a select few icons (or we have enough space). ( imo icons should be feeds, stats, starred. see my previous mail) 2) The (pages belonging to the) icons form a separate group, and we don't feel that they really belong in any of the other main categories. For now I think that both assumptions are fulfilled, but depending on the amount of new features that will be added, these assumptions might become untrue. When that becomes the case, I'm fine with getting rid of the icons and 'hiding them' in subcategories. * starred: this is just 'home' but with a filter for the tag starred. fine like it is for me. I was thinking that people need to have quick access to their starred actions. If this I'm wrong here, we could place Starred in a submenu I think it's fine like it is. Easily reachable, and doesn't take much space as an icon. -> So i would keep most of the icons like they are. they don't need much space anyway. I'd like to find consistency in the menu bar if we change it. So why keep the icons and move Contexts to a submenu? Let's rethink what needs to be accessed quickly and what is ok to put in submenus i don't think there is anything wrong with having a menu (with main and subcategories) and also having icons, per se. As long as the icons do not really belong in any of the main categories we will have (see above). Starred/feeds/stats are 'special' things :) btw, you can try tracks with my suggestion for the main menu on http://github.com/lrbalt/tracks/tree/newmenu Reinier
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