Hi,
In the meeting today Spot brought up a couple of issues with the navigation design that we've known about for a while and maybe should address for milestone 1:
- When you're viewing the details of a package, you have three tabs on top - Overview | Builds | Updates. Builds takes you to a list of ALL packages' builds, updates takes you to a list of ALL packages updates, but overview takes you to the overview for the particular package you're looking at. It's internally inconsistent.
- When you're viewing the details of a user, the tabs across relate to that single user, not all users. So having tabs that relate to all packages across the top of a single package is inconsistent and thus could bring about confusion.
I wrestled with this for much of today and came up with a mockup I'd like to propose we go with to address this problem. Here is the mockup:
https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/2/22/Fedoracommunity-navrethinking-propo...
Here are the changes we'll need to make to do this:
* the tabs on the top of the package details pages should be: * Overview * Package Details * Maintenance Tools * s/Package Maintenance/Maintenance Tools - for the right nav bar - I think this wording is more effective at communicating the differences in the link categories. * Add the 'All Packages' navigation with links to all packages, builds, and updates so they are available with only one click. Add this panel to every package details screen.
We had considered adding the subnav for 'all packages' under the 'package maintenance' tab in the left nav, but it looks a little awkward (see https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/3/39/Fedoracommunity-navrethinking-1.png ) and I am guessing would be more time-consuming to implement. Adding the 'all packages' little panel on the right-hand side I think helps address the concern about being able to access these screens with one click easily from any single package.
The general pattern we could adopt from this approach:
* Single objects (package details, people profiles) have tabs that relate only to that single object along the top. If that single object has more than one level of navigation, the first level of that object's navigation is represented across the top and sublevels are represented in a navbar panel on the righthand side of the page. * Lists of objects (lists of packages, lists of people) have tabs that relate only to those lists along the top. For example, an area of the UI that is primarily used for showing lists of people would have tabs across the top that were different configurations of lists of people (e.g., "All People", "New People", "Package Maintainers" etc). Tabs that relate to any single object should not be displayed there. * When a single object is part of a larger collection, there should be a panel box in all the pages of its details tabs to link straight out to the relevant collections' navigation. For example, within the details of any pacakge, you should be able to link out to a list of all packages. From the details of any user who is a member of group A, you should be able to link to a list of all users who are members of group A.
Does this make sense? What do you think?
~m