Grouping or prioritisation for items in create menu

This idea had come up previously as issue 📌 Add "Add" item to toolbar. Needs work including input from the UX team.

Some questions that had come up with that:

- Do content creators need to know what entity type they are creating? Or do they just need to know how it's called on their site?
- How does it look if there are so many items that list is longer then the screen?
- Contrib and custom modules should also be able to add their links into the list.

I’m not totally sold on the grouping idea, that was proposed in the other issue. I guess I don’t have the solution, just raising a concern about the current UX.

I myself find it hard to parse even the shortest list to find the content type I’m after. But I'm willing to concede that this is just because it’s a change and new users may not find the same.

Some more thoughts after having discussed this with some people at DevDays:

• If the items are not grouped then they would need to be listed alphabetically - rather then having them sorted by type but without disclosing that to the content creator. Without headings to group them, that just looks like a scrambled random list. And as in the issue description: some are used so rarely that it looks more like clutter..
• Grouping them by type and using that as a heading (node/content, media, user, taxonomy term etc.) provides some structure, and a way to break down long lists. But does the content creater need to know what is what entity type?
• On many sites, different types of content might belong together. For example, on a site that displays information about conferences, the content creator might need to create a node for the event, several speaker profiles, a taxonomy term for the city and a custom geo entity for the venue. Grouping them together would improve the UX for the content creator, and as site builders we can configure that for them. It can't be standardized, but grouping by type looks and works nicely out of the box, then we can just change it for the individual site. (Even if it requires some content export for the new menu items.

Note: this is not for the look and feel but an example, how menu items could end up on specific website if grouped for the content creater UX.

Further to the previous comment, the Type Tray module → does allow for grouping content types into categories. Maybe there's a way to leverage those groupings in the menu?

Redirect and media bundles don't really belong here IMO.

Redirects are content entities, but they're not site content, and they're usually created silently by pathauto, creating manual redirects is much more of an edge case.

Media entities are usually (but not exclusively) created via the media widget on other entity types.

I also personally wouldn't put 'User' here either since there can be sites where a user is never manually created.

If all of these were gone, the list in the issue summary would be very short, and then categories might not be necessary at all.

Here we need to consider that people add their own types so there can be many, many items on this list.

I think we have these three things to consider:

1. Navigation structure
2. Handling many / unknown number of items
3. Presentation and ordering

Navigation structure

@catch makes a great point that media and redirects don't belong here. From the top level of this menu, I would expect to select 'media' to create a media item. We should consider only having content types here. That being the case renaming 'Create' to something more informative for that scenario. I don't think 'Create' by itself is the right word because it can easily be confused with carrying out a creative task like setting global colour and theming parameters.

For figuring out the structure in the menu for these items, this is a perfect candidate for a tree testing exercise.

Without putting work into research, I think we would find that content types are a special case and if we have 'create' in this menu for other things it would fall below a top level item for the topic. For example, 'Add new redirect' should be under a top level 'SEO' menu item; 'Upload files' should be under 'Media' top level menu item.

For an entirely different approach, @ifrik might be onto something with the mockup in #4 if users could expand and collapse 'create' but I don't think we could have it always expanded, as it would increase the size of the top level.

Handling many / unknown number of items

If we only have content types here then it might also solve the many items problem but we might still think about what a user sees when there are 40 content types. 'More' links are the obvious thing or just the ability to endlessly scroll, but there might be other design devices.

Presentation and ordering

For ordering, the most useful thing for users I can imagine would be that the first items in the list are their individual most recently used or most used, the most used by all users of this instance, or the most popular based on some analysis.

I can see the use case but I'm (probably) not in favour of heavy duty configuration in core because the less cluttered the system, the easier it is to use. I think this would be for a separate issue, but we could add in place editing and handles across the navigation so that either users with elevated privileges could rename headings and reorder items in place globally or each user could set their own. If a majority of users do want to do more than this, it's an indication that we haven't got the default behaviour right.

I think icons would help - even for custom types there are popular names that we could provide icons for

Quick win?

With what we currently have in place I would suggest this for a quick win and then follow up with design and ideation:

Group the items by entity type with a heading (Content Types, Media Types) just as described in the 'Proposed resolution'
Decide on a sensible limit for items in each group
If more than the limit, print a 'more' link