Perhaps this might be best implemented as optional, but I would love to see drop-down subitems for the top menus.
For example, I know I want to go to ‘Shares’. Ideally I’d like to point my mouse at Storage, get a drop down list of the subpages under Storage so I can slick Shares from there. I very rarely actually want the first page I’m taken when I click on any of menus so being able to directly go where I want is just nice.
If you’re familiar with the menus in napp-it, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Another alternative implementation that I like is an expansion of the left pane to be more like a site-map with all the main and subpages listed on the left regardless of what you’re looking at in the right pane. An example of this would be in pfSense, changing the theme from pfsense-ng to just ‘pfsense’ (done under System -> General Setup -> Theme).
With either of these, whatever you want is just a point->click or scroll->click away. While 2 clicks isn’t the end of the world, sometimes you wonder what main section that subsection is under and you’d know it if you see it, but you have to click through main sections to hunt for it before you can see it.
Thanks for offering really good ideas. We are just finishing up with bootstrap upgrade that give the ui a new look. It doesn’t change the functionality or the interface, however. I do agree that we can do better with navigation between screens and quite frankly, a lot more on the UX side of things. Here’s a new issue I created to start that effort.
@seijirou just want to circle back here and update that this is now done. We have nice dropdowns in the navbar and also make actions efficient. We are looking into replacing navbar clicks with just hovering, a small change we will experiment with a bit and add in future if it makes sense.