Design of the next version of Mindquarry: Navigation
It's now time to present our design for the next version of Mindquarry (called Eagle). It includes a redesign of the navigation and mockups for the shiny new talk component. You can see a presentation of everything (aka the results of our UCD process) in a pdf version with lots of animation explaining all the buttons and things.
For now, I will show you the new navigation. What do we mean by navigation? Well, everything that builds the framework of each page in the web interface, that is at the top and left and will be your guide through the entire application. This was not yet perfect in our first release (1.0-M1) so we decided to completely overhaul it.
One of the biggest difficulties is the two-dimensional navigation tree: there are the sections like Files, Wiki, Tasks etc. (the colorful tabs at the top) and there are your teams (the drop down box at the top left) which are kind of a meta-layer. For each team there is a Files and Wiki section. This wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't the Teams tab/section: we wanted this to be visible always so that it is easy to change your teams and add new members but it breaks the section concept: if you see the list of all teams in the Teams section you are not inside a team. Things get more complicate as you can select "All your teams" in the drop down box and then you see a list of all teams in each section....
So we improved that and lots of other things. See this mockup for how it will look like (see the pdf for an annotated view):
Let's list the most important changes:
- Breadcrumbs that show exactly where you are
- A teams list in the sidebar with one-click switch to another team
- Real tabs, ie. the active tab is clearly in front of the other ones
- A 2nd level navigation inside the active tab (eg. Start page, All pages)
- Buttons for creating things (like new user, new page, new task, etc.) always visible at the top right of the content area
- The global search box in the top left where it is more obvious and does not occupy the space of tabs
- A visual separation between a content page (like the Start page screenshot above) as a tab with a white background and lists (like the screenshot below) that are "behind" the content tab
And last but not least we will integrate better colors (as we think, but color discussions are somehow difficult...). See the following image for a quick look at them (from top to bottom: wiki, tasks, files, teams, talk, welcome):
We think that this re-design dramatically improves the usability when using the mindquarry collaboration server. So stay tuned for the next release!
PS: If you noticed the green rectangle at the top right saying Successfully saved, you might have recognized that this very much AJAX-style. And yes, we will have a fully ajaxified application along with the new navigation that does only change the content of the pages (no full page reloading) and that has a very nice looking fading effect!
Posted at 05:57PM Apr 05, 2007 by Alexander Klimetschek in General |