Usability review
We discussed the current state of the navigation module at #3436905: Drupal Usability Meeting 2024-04-05. That issue will have a link to a recording of the meeting.
For the record, the attendees at the usability meeting were @AaronMcHale, @benjifisher, @rkoller, @shaal, @simohell, @skaught, and @worldlinemine.
If you want more feedback from the usability team, a good way to reach out is in the #ux channel in Slack.
On the request of @ckrina this is only a hopefully short summary of the main points we had a clear consensus about during the meeting. For clarification or more in depth elaboration just ping us.
1. Interacting with the new navigation by mouse has several potential stumbling blocks for the user:
- Continuous showing & hiding of the drawer on hover when moving from eg
usernameup the sidebar towardscreate- makes things busy and distracting. - Mix of interaction patterns, on click & on hover for top-level and only on click for sub menu items in the drawer leads into confusion and conflicts in particular in the context of top-level menu items.
- Even with the triangle pattern we occasionally managed getting out of the hover tunnel
Suggestion was to expand on click instead of to expand on hover by default, and adding a user setting to switch to hover interaction plus creating a follow up issue discussing improvements for the hover interaction.
The attendees of the Drupal Dojo Austin as well as @charles-belov raised the same point independently in their testing.
2. In the context of navigation blocks, there are potential original language mixups for navigation block titles on multilingual sites. See the created: #3438953: The default original strings of a navigation block could get populated by another installed language
3. Group was in line with the points raised in #3438789: Improve the clarity about the navigation block overview page and the "Place navigation block" dialog modal for the overview page and #3427940: Make "Place navigation block" a primary button and move it right before the table for the place nav button to improve clarity and keep the user in control.
In addition there was the suggestion to have more than one region in the sidebar to for example enable to control also the blocks in the footer including the user nav block. In consequence, in case there should be only a single region change the button to action link on top outside the table as suggested in #3427940: Make "Place navigation block" a primary button and move it right before the table, if there should be more than one region change the pattern to the one used on the block layout page.