[dev] Redesigning the menu

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hi!

There has been a fair amount of user feedback indicating that Horde  
could improve its usability. With Horde 4 we definitely still have a  
number of areas that are not exactly sound. While we excel in features  
and flexibility both the UI design and usability are probably not our  
strongest point.

My tendency would be to pull in help from the outside to improve this.  
This will most likely not be trivial as we cannot make this a huge  
project for an external agency and then try to combine this with our  
development. This is unlikely to work.

The idea would rather be to improve the situation step-by-step. We -  
on the developer side (maybe with feedback from horde at lists.horde.org)  
- would decide on the next item to tackle and what the rough boundary  
parameters concerning the development side would be. After we agree on  
something that we might be able to support in the next development  
cycle the Horde LLC would make that a project for a small design  
agency and integrate the result into Horde. The LLC currently has a  
reasonable amount of funds to do this and from the internal  
discussions it looked as we are all interested in spending it on the  
usability/design topic.

Assuming that people might be interested in going this route I would  
like to suggest a first possible step: The redesign on the Horde  
menu(s). While I wanted to have this suggestion a bit more fleshed out  
before posting it to this list I currently lack the time to do so and  
I don't want to keep the basic idea lingering around much longer.

The idea would be to copy from the current Google toolbar. Most people  
using Google+ should know it. I believe the various Google  
applications present a situation that matches out situation very well.  
Especially the dynamic applications all start to evolve their own  
specific user interface and don't rely that much on having a unified  
sidebar anymore. So we would collapse the sidebar and the top menu  
into one bar at the top of the screen. Depending on the menu entry it  
would either be a simple link to the corresponding application or a  
drop down menu containing quick links for the applications. Google  
primarily uses links but offers a drop down for the profile, share and  
preferences section. I guess we could do something similar and maybe  
also do drop downs for the applications. Those could take some of the  
elements we currently have in the side bar if we feel that is necessary.

But this is just the general idea for now and I would not want to  
define/restrict it too much to leave room for suggestions from any  
external partner we might want to contract for that.

But I'd like to know if you consider it a path that would make sense  
for the different applications but also views (only static and dynamic  
- not minimal or smartphone). What might be the hard parameters that  
we can't get around?

I'd be happy about feedback :)

Thanks!

Gunnar

-- 
Core Developer
The Horde Project

e: wrobel at horde.org
t: +49 700 6245 0000
w: http://www.horde.org

pgp: 9703 43BE
tweets: http://twitter.com/pardus_de
blog: http://log.pardus.de