As much as I like staying on task, and getting stuff done, sometimes I just need a creative break. We’ve been doing a bunch of planning this week to get ready for 3.5 (which is looking awesome). But, I decided to set aside some time this afternoon to fiddle with a feature of my choosing (whether it was earmarked for 3.5 or not).
I chose to play around with the left main navigation.
My disclaimers
- I’m NOT lobbying to change the left navigation in 3.5. This was merely a experiment/creative outlet
- I’ll be the first to admit that this approach very well may be crap 😉 There is still plenty of room for improvement. That’s the beauty of iterative design!
- I picked this feature because it’s been on my mind lately, and I’d rather get my thoughts recorded for future discussions, than lose them.
- If this is distraction to you, please just ignore it. 🙂 If this is interesting to you, I’d love to hear your feedback. If you’d like to riff off of these mockups, here are the source files (I used balsamiq): left nav | left nav expanded
Less options (with more action-based text)
Instead of a feature based list of options (Posts, Plugins, etc…), I tried to focus on “action based” words. Here’s what I came up with:
http://cl.ly/0F3A0H1k0n1F2N2P2q2R
- I’m not sold on “My site” as the top option, but I couldn’t think of any alternatives.
- “Comments” would be better as “Manage comments” in my mind, but I’m not sure how everyone feels about 2 words being there.
Juicier sub-navs
I sort of had the http://www.amazon.com/ left hand nav in mind while working on this:
http://cl.ly/0f2n2o1j1a1Z070W3t3T
- The second set of options under the “Add” and “Edit” section were just an experiment. Alternatively I thought about putting the 5 most recent posts under “Edit” (instead of the “My Sites” set of links)
- It would be nice to re-group/re-think the settings options (but that is another discussion)
Thoughts?