Suggestion, sort of sparked by something Antechinus said on Elk: bringing the profile and PM stuff under one heading...
How about we bring a new top level menu item into play, whose top level heading is the user's own display name? Under it would be the profile stuff, plus the PM stuff and if we wanted to go really crazy we could put the notifications thing there too. Or bring it all together under the notifications popup.
This has a lot of interesting implications that all tie together - I guess the comment I made about the menu bar being hidden on mobile fell into the ether.
So, let's back up. If you're on mobile, you won't see the menu bar because it'll be in the sidebar and most people won't check that because that's how most people are. If they can't see it, they won't check it most of the time simply because if it's not there, it's not relevant to them.[1] And so people who predominantly use mobile won't see that they have personal messages.
Solution 1: send a notification about PMs. It reduces the priority of having messages in the top level menu, there's simply less burning need to have them up there (though I'm not saying they have to go, but they do get to lose some of their otherwise premium status)
Solution 2: pull profile and PMs out of the menu. Pull them up by the notifications area. Maybe even give PMs a similar interface to the notifications one for showing the inbox, and a similar set of controls for configuration and sending a new message. We can also refit the access-to-own-profile from there and make it easier for people to get to their own configurable items. I'm thinking this would ultimately be in line with overhauling the profile anyway.
Solution 2 means we get to separate the profile and messages items which don't really fit in the menu anyway if you stop and think about it, they're just there because there isn't anywhere else for them and it means we have less need to pull the menu out of page layout in mobile because there's less of it and it means what gets up there can be more meaningful to the *site*.
Consider: you get to show: Home, Admin, Media, Members, Logout. (We could even move the login/out options up there, too) Unlike the profile and so on which relate to YOU, these things relate to the SITE. To me this just makes more sense to have as principle navigation. We can still do PMs-getting-notifications and in fact probably should convert it to that if feasible[2] and that would also solve some issues WRT navigation if the menu bar is going to be hidden. (And we get to streamline preferences for PMs, potentially, if not. I dunno. I just think it'd be a nice way to tackle it.)
Pulling this stuff off the menu also means that we don't do weird things like highlighting the profile tab when you're not viewing your own profile which seems semi logical a thing to do but it's also not really so logical when you stop to think about it. The button is highlighted even though you're not actually *there*, on the place you'd be if you'd pressed the button yourself.
As a follow-on to this, I'd consider putting a 'What's new' option or similar on the menu in their place. I'm not sure whether that would be pulling in Unread Posts or Unread Replies or both in some fashion but I'd certainly bring them out of the sidebar to that point.
At this point I'm mindful that the sidebar is increasingly for 'less important content' in which case I'm trying to discourage major navigational items from being hidden - unread posts/unread replies is useful navigation, if not quite as 'major' as perhaps it might be. But if it were on the top level menu, that makes things a bit different.[3]
And now, just because it's that point in time, I'm going to invoke the devil just to reinforce my point.
(click to show/hide)
If it makes you feel any better you can safely ignore the spoiler above and let the arguments stand on their merit. But if you can tolerate my pointing out what the competition does and why they do it and why we should follow a similar path, read it.
@Nao: Random question. I was going to use footnotes in the above spoiler tag but then I realised that footnotes will be pulled out of the spoiler and into the footer list along with the rest. Should footnotes adhere to the same parenting like they do with quotes (i.e. staying inside the quote they were made in?) or have their current behaviour?
How about we bring a new top level menu item into play, whose top level heading is the user's own display name? Under it would be the profile stuff, plus the PM stuff and if we wanted to go really crazy we could put the notifications thing there too. Or bring it all together under the notifications popup.
This has a lot of interesting implications that all tie together - I guess the comment I made about the menu bar being hidden on mobile fell into the ether.
So, let's back up. If you're on mobile, you won't see the menu bar because it'll be in the sidebar and most people won't check that because that's how most people are. If they can't see it, they won't check it most of the time simply because if it's not there, it's not relevant to them.[1] And so people who predominantly use mobile won't see that they have personal messages.
Solution 1: send a notification about PMs. It reduces the priority of having messages in the top level menu, there's simply less burning need to have them up there (though I'm not saying they have to go, but they do get to lose some of their otherwise premium status)
Solution 2: pull profile and PMs out of the menu. Pull them up by the notifications area. Maybe even give PMs a similar interface to the notifications one for showing the inbox, and a similar set of controls for configuration and sending a new message. We can also refit the access-to-own-profile from there and make it easier for people to get to their own configurable items. I'm thinking this would ultimately be in line with overhauling the profile anyway.
Solution 2 means we get to separate the profile and messages items which don't really fit in the menu anyway if you stop and think about it, they're just there because there isn't anywhere else for them and it means we have less need to pull the menu out of page layout in mobile because there's less of it and it means what gets up there can be more meaningful to the *site*.
Consider: you get to show: Home, Admin, Media, Members, Logout. (We could even move the login/out options up there, too) Unlike the profile and so on which relate to YOU, these things relate to the SITE. To me this just makes more sense to have as principle navigation. We can still do PMs-getting-notifications and in fact probably should convert it to that if feasible[2] and that would also solve some issues WRT navigation if the menu bar is going to be hidden. (And we get to streamline preferences for PMs, potentially, if not. I dunno. I just think it'd be a nice way to tackle it.)
Pulling this stuff off the menu also means that we don't do weird things like highlighting the profile tab when you're not viewing your own profile which seems semi logical a thing to do but it's also not really so logical when you stop to think about it. The button is highlighted even though you're not actually *there*, on the place you'd be if you'd pressed the button yourself.
As a follow-on to this, I'd consider putting a 'What's new' option or similar on the menu in their place. I'm not sure whether that would be pulling in Unread Posts or Unread Replies or both in some fashion but I'd certainly bring them out of the sidebar to that point.
At this point I'm mindful that the sidebar is increasingly for 'less important content' in which case I'm trying to discourage major navigational items from being hidden - unread posts/unread replies is useful navigation, if not quite as 'major' as perhaps it might be. But if it were on the top level menu, that makes things a bit different.[3]
And now, just because it's that point in time, I'm going to invoke the devil just to reinforce my point.
XenForo does this. IPB does this. Facebook does this. They do essentially what I'm proposing because of the reasons I'm proposing them: you pull stuff that isn't about the site out of the place where site content navigation is and you pull them together. Alerts/notifications and your profile and so on should be out of the way of site content precisely because they're not site content. They're your content and only directly have relevance to you, not to everyone. So they don't belong in the navigation that everyone has.
There is a larger argument here. I'm not advocating copying the competition. I'm advocating taking the same path they did for the same reason they did. Because form follows function. The profile and PM functions are not site content. They shouldn't be with site navigation. If that includes log in/log out navigation too, fine. Just get them the hell out of the main menu because they don't belong there. Make site navigation for the site content, not the user content. Pull that stuff out the way into the top of the page where users will always have access to it (much as they already do, except currently on mobile), we have the room, we already have UI/UX precedent for it with notifications (implicitly a USER function not a SITE function) and language selection (which is totally a user function anyway) up there, let's finish it up with making it consistent.
If it makes you feel any better you can safely ignore the spoiler above and let the arguments stand on their merit. But if you can tolerate my pointing out what the competition does and why they do it and why we should follow a similar path, read it.
@Nao: Random question. I was going to use footnotes in the above spoiler tag but then I realised that footnotes will be pulled out of the spoiler and into the footer list along with the rest. Should footnotes adhere to the same parenting like they do with quotes (i.e. staying inside the quote they were made in?) or have their current behaviour?
1. | This is a killer reason why auto hiding the sidebar is actually a bad idea and if you remember it was the key reason I didn't want the notifications in the sidebar, because being at the bottom means people aren't going to see it. The same argument can and should be made for the principle cross-site navigation: if it's hidden by default, it's a butt ache to navigate around. |
2. | Though I'm mindful of the consequences of this in terms of the code if you have PMs going to a bunch of people at once, especially if that's going to include announcements having the same code path. @Dragooon, what are your thoughts on this? How sane/insane is it to try and generate a large number of notifications for large numbers of users at a time? I know in the newsletter code we already have the continue/not-done code so we can stage it a bit better, but I'd rather not generate several queries for each notification if at all possible. But I don't remember how that part works. |
3. | See, then, if we kill those two items from the sidebar, we might as well remove the avatar from there too. Time too while we're at it. These things are simply not that useful, doubly so on a sidebar that only some users will even see anyway. |