elgg navigation

My newest pet peeve with elgg is navigation.

I don't like the topbar. My users clearly also do not like the topbar (although they won't admit this - I think it's subconscious!), because they are not even aware of everything that's on the site, suggesting that they don't intuitively understand where everything is. Example: I have several groups that I've created. One, help & support, has barely been visited. It was only even noticed to exist once I added an extra dropdown specifically called help. The chat area of the site, likewise, was barely noticed until I added an extra dropdown for it. Obviously, this isn't going to work. If I add a dropdown for every major site feature, the topbar will metaphorically become so heavy it'll fall out the bottom of my site.

I have some ideas on how to make this better - a right-side treebar for example - but am interested what other ideas people have. Perhaps as a group we can come up with something brilliant that'll help all of our sites, and not just the one we're individually developing.

Please share any thoughts. :D

  • Wow - a very active and interesting thread.

    Having said that, I am often surprised to hear that people think that a lack of awareness of the features of a social network can be overcome by improving the navigation or design.

    In my experience, web site operators (including social network admins) put far too much attention on tweaking the design and not nearly enough emphasis on other factors. Here are some of those:

    - most users of a site are interested in a tiny fraction of the features. How many people ever click on the "Advanced search" link for Google (10% ?) for example? I'm not sure but expect that it is low. That is not to say that power features for power users are unimportant.

    - lack of proper documentation. A one page overview or perhaps a video guide for your site might work wonders.

    - mentoring. This is especially important for a social network. About a fifth of my support comments on this site boil down to "read the docs". It's amazing how many people do not find the prominent Docs link on this site but manage to figure out how to post a comment on a group discussion forum. Surely this is not about navigation but something else. Baffling. Nevertheless, I think that it's useful to have people who are willing to post "read the docs", possibly with a link to the appropriate place. Ditto for wannabe developers that don't know how to use basic search tools like Google or grep. Some people are permanently clueless, but I think a bit of mentoring can work wonders.

  • @Read The Docs ==> http://community.elgg.org/mod/groups/topicposts.php?topic=118147&group_guid=52477.

    It's all indexed there

    LOL;; -)

    I spend a cpl of hours coding my Wiki crawler / indexer and so few people try to look up the docs using my index ;-(

  • This is odd...

    I made a change to only show the menu to logged in users (at least temporarily ... I don't like that IE users new to the site will see it jumbled up and messy, until I fix it [none of my current userbase use IE at all, strangely])... and now, three of my topbar menus are suddenly visible. IE, the elgg topbar menus. Specifically, Groups, Chat, and Help. None of these were visible before.

    *scratches head*

  • Another thing you can do is post a series of well written articles on your site that highlight different features with best case examples. The 5 best blog posts, the five most well written forum comments, the 5 most interesting pictures, etc. Lead through example.

  • @Kevin Jardine: I do much the same on my site RE mentoring. I have made a point of, when I'm on and around and a new user signs up, leaving them a welcome message on their messageboard and telling them to ask someone on the wire if they need help or reply on my messageboard for same. Other users who've been around on the site for a bit are now doing the same when I'm not around, which is good.

    Unfortunately there are always those totally baffling individuals who do not see the pretty obvious "Help" menu right up there on the topbar of my site, do not bother to ask on the wire, do not leave me a message, and just sign up, hang around for a short while, then vanish and never come back. I can only assume something is very unclear with regards navigation for those people (since although I'm not THAT good at writing help docs, I'm not that bad either!), hence my desire to create a simple actions menu.

    Also worth noting that since I put the mini_profile widget on the river page, new users are setting up their profile icon right away, rather than being on site for maybe two-three days before they actually figure out how to.

    It's all a rather intriguing glimpse at a pet project of mine, an essay I'm writing on how the average modern human is not exploratory and requires more hand-holding than our ancestors appear to have needed... but that's a whole other subject.

    ...hm, I like that "best of" idea. *ponders*

  • Hi Dagorath,

    The vanishing member is a common problem with social networks and has everything to do with the people and content involved in the network and very little to do with the navigation I think. It is very common for people to sign up to a social network and then do little with it (just like I've done for MySpace/Facebook/Hyves/Yahoo 360/LinkedIn/Orkut/Bebo). Why do I ignore those places and hang out here instead? Because the people I want to interact with are here and not there!

  • This site (elgg) doesn't even use the default navigation of elgg. Notice the important sections of the site highlighted by the menu at the top "Home, About, News" On my site it is; photos, videos, etc.... from the default install of elgg, you need to goto the link under tools, then click another link to see everyones.

    easy navigation (which will keep people coming back) for the site would be 3 choices for most sections of a site A "my xxx" link, an "all xxx" link, and an "add xxx" link. What more do you need before it gets confusing. You could always add shortcuts for the top x or the most popular x, but these would probably be better as widgets for the sections or the navigation for that section.  

     

    I hang out here for the people and information also, but I don't think this is the best setup for support. It's very difficult to find things. You need to be a member of secret group to find the basic answers most of the time. Forget about searching for stuff, I can't even find half the stuff I posted without having to use 16 search engines. Thats cool for hacking and projects, not for general support info. I wish they would setup your vanilla forum plugin, that would help a lot.

  • ohh.. which "secret group" is this that i have missed ;-) ?

    ps: i've usually had some luck finding i've posted long ago and not bookmarked it.

  • secret group = the group your (not you in general) is not a member of.

    I can usually find the info I'm looking for on this site or in the google groups, but, I have to look, can never find anything when I search. could be just me, also

     

  • <sidetracking>

    @skotmiller: the whole groups thing is great, except it spreads information too widely as you point out. It would be nice to have more search options too - currently searching for any one topic not only searches the community site but also a couple other things (trac, for one). While this is useful behaviour on some occasions, on others it makes any particular search difficult. For example if I look for a piece of code I found in the core elgg installation, I'm less likely to find discussions on it immediately than I am to find stuff from trac on it. IE, there was a bug, X $timeframe ago, that was fixed... and so isn't relevant currently, inside my search scope.

    Having advanced search options (search community only, or trac + community, or groups only, or plugins + groups but not themes, or trac + plugins but not themes, groups...) would go a long way to making the frankly large amount of info on this site easily available. Though that's another topic, it's also not, because how search works = an important part of site navigation as well.

    Example of the problem: I am a newbie. I want to know what

    echo $vars['url'];

    is. I might guess, I might not. I might know enough PHP to have a strong idea but not have the time right now to check it out - so I want to find what other people have already asked about this. Currently, if I go and search for that, none of the first page of results are exactly relevant. Yes, I can refine it, but the only result left to me with choosing "support groups" is an unhelpful link to the plugin development group. Not inside it. To it.

    Not really complaining as I'm used to having to sift large amounts of data to find anything anywhere anyway - search is tricky to do right any way you look at it - but something more akin to the kind of search options you'd get with one of the major forums (phpbb etc) would be very nice.

    </sidetracking>