Imported from previous forum
John Cameron suggested that it would be useful for people visiting the site specifically to access frequently-used areas like Discussion, FIXWiki and FIXimate to be provided with a "Fasttrack" method of getting there that reduced it to a single click.... so we have come up with the following idiom which keeps this away from more conventional and context dependent navigational forms but is always visible throughout irrespective of context (screenshots attached).
Comments welcome before we deploy it. Its extensible so easy to add tabs and specify the corresponding URL. At alater stage we could also explore adding the capacity for users to define their own custom tabs.
These screenshots are taken from our testing rig where it is already deployed. It can be revised in a matter of minutes if the required changes are simple. We have not yet tested for browser compatibility, but would expect it to be OK on >IE7+ and still functional below that. We can check that out once there is some consensus on the basic approach.
When the icons are not in hover mode:-
When hovering over the "Discussions" icon....
and when hovering over FIXWiki icon
We can customise the Icons etc to suit (within reason). We are leaning to a "monochrome" Icon convention in the site pallette instead of the coloured one displayed in the screeshots, as for example, the yellow MediaWiki icon is a bit visually intrusive. Any suggestion for alternative Icon gratefully recieved, but these have the advantage of being ones we are commercially licensed to use, or are Creative Commons/Mediawiki Commons.
I agree with John that fast access would be very useful. However, I do not see a big problem to get to the main discussion page. What I struggle with is to find a specific discussion category(?). The list of discussions presented to me under newest, popular and latest have a sort order I cannot figure out. Using the search box does not get me what I expect. I assume it is because it is a search "by tag" as it says and not by title. If no tag has been associated with the discussion then it will not show up. The search box is then made empty so that I do not know what I typed and if I maybe had a typo. Iguess it is also not a search by "discussion category" although one assumes just that as the page title also says "All discussions" and not "All discussion categories". The concept is unclear to me.
Another point on direct links. The dashboard gives me many "Your XYZ" entries. There are many grey ones having things like committee/working group/discussions that I cannot access. I would have expected those to be direct links to the committee/working group/discussionsI am a member of or that I am following. What is the concept here?
"Latest" is the topic with the most recent comment, "Newest" is the most recent Topic created, and "Popular" is them ordered by the number of Followers.
I find "Discussion" ambiguous, and prefer a distinction between Discussion Categories and Discussion Topics (ie threads, in the old parlance), but this menu describes it this way at PO request for cosmetic reasons....
"Your" indicates ownership, rather than the ones you follow. They are greyed out if you cannot create/own this content type. All the views that relate to participation rather than ownership are from the "Community" menu, although there are links in the menus ione level down to permit traansition between the views - e.g. "Committees you follow"
The search issue is easily resolved I think. Let me look into syntax so I can think about how to make it smooth.
S
As a general principle, "Dashboard" relates to you as a contributor/owner of site content, and "Community" relates to you as a consumer/participant.