Navigating to first level menu items is not obvious

Created on 12 October 2024, 8 months ago

Problem/Motivation

I repost a part of @scott_euser s comment from #3439012-19: Usability review and feedback from testing because I think it is valuable feedback, that has not made it into the roadmap yet 📌 New Toolbar Roadmap: Path to Beta & Stable Active

The title within the drawer wasn't considered click-able. It looked like a header with no affordance being a clickable link.

> We had clients with the same issue, it was not obvious that they could get at the /admin/people list from this 'People' so they believed they only had access to create new users, but not access a list of existing users to make sure their colleagues could log in:

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

> A possible solution to that one (which could apply to the lower level as well) is to separate the menu item link from the ability to navigate to its child items:

> This seems to match the advice in https://infinum.com/blog/website-navigation-dropdown-menus/ which shows that its 'Version 2' which has both the top level link clickable + the overview link within the sub-navigation as being the quickest to achieve the task + the least margin of error for users.

> A less clear UX article on it from NN hints at this too in item 12, but the separation only becomes clear when you actually visit the example they point to

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

Introduced terminology

API changes

Data model changes

Release notes snippet

Feature request
Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

navigation.module

Created by

🇩🇪Germany anruether Bonn

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @anruether
  • 🇩🇪Germany anruether Bonn

    The proposed solution -if applied to second level items as well- would also solve 🐛 Second level menu items can't be reached if they have children Active .

  • 🇳🇿New Zealand quietone

    Changes are made on on 11.x (our main development branch) first, and are then back ported as needed according to our policies.

  • 🇦🇺Australia mstrelan

    I tend to middle-click or ctrl+click on links to open them in a new tab. I try to do this with the "Configuration" top-level nav item but it's not a link, so doesn't work. It would be good to make it a link. I can do the same with the "Extend" item because it is a leaf.

  • 🇬🇧United Kingdom scott_euser

    I guess the problem here is that it looks like a title and so user's ignore it. How can we update the design to have this be clear that its a link?

  • I tend to middle-click or ctrl+click on links to open them in a new tab. I try to do this with the "Configuration" top-level nav item but it's not a link, so doesn't work. It would be good to make it a link. I can do the same with the "Extend" item because it is a leaf.

    Same. The new module is hard to use because of the difference between the top-level links.

    I approve of the proposed resolution:

    A possible solution to that one (which could apply to the lower level as well) is to separate the menu item link from the ability to navigate to its child items

    I have a site that uses this structure for its non-admin menu, and it works really well on both desktop and mobile. Items that don't have children can just be links, and items that have children but aren't themselves clickable can be expanded but not clicked. Works great.

  • I guess the problem here is that it looks like a title and so user's ignore it. How can we update the design to have this be clear that its a link?

    With the proposed solution in the issue summary, it can remain a title because the icon itself will be clickable again.

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