Improving our navigation, the next iteration

Question

Update: A Release Candidate has been announced

It's been another month for the new navigation team, and today we are releasing a new iteration.

With this iteration we've accomplished most of what we set out to do initially: we've provided an easier way of navigating the site, exposing a few hidden features and making it possible to use what was already there more effectively.

In short, after moving the cheese, we're making sure all cheese is neatly ...stacked.

Here is what is new:

• AJAX all the things! Navigation is now javascript-powered and we don't do postbacks if possible.

  

• Tab pinning! What tab you see on the home page is now an explicit choice instead of being autosaved.

  

• Tag engine performance! We are hitting a performance bottleneck with tag engine. This is why you sometimes see empty results (but see a list upon refresh) and why bounty numbers are inconsistent. We've started optimizing the engine and you should see 10%-20% better perf now, which means you should hit empty results less often. That said -- we are working hard to get your question lists much faster in the future.

• New URL structure and easier permalinks! Question lists now use a folder-based URL structure instead of a param based one. Permalinks are now injected in the address bar for enhanced copy-pasta performance.

  

• UI cheese shuffle! Tabs moved on the right, similar to the user page. This makes the left title unnecessary and gives us more space overall.

  

• Simplified "need answers" tab sorts! We reduced the sorts by one, and we're left with "all" (questions that need answers for any reason), "no answers" (questions with zero answers), "bounties" (questions with a bounty)

  

How do you get it?

Go to your user preferences page, look at the bottom. Check the checkbox, or un-check it to go back to normal. Checking the box puts you in a waiting list. We'll be adding tons of users this round!

What's next?

Next we'll be focusing on

• Polishing the current UI
• Extending the new navigation to the mobile site
• Extending the new navigation to anonymous users

and we'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter!

How to Feedback

Please file bug reports as separate questions (like any other bug!) so they end up in our bug tracker, and can be status-completed. Any other form of feedback is fine in here. Hopefully this is not as complicated as it sounds...

Answer 1

I like the "hide excerpts" feature, it lets me fit more questions on the screen.

But when I pick a single tag from my favorites (my usual navigation pattern), the interface takes more screen estate than before, thus pushing the first question down the screen.

So here's my feature-request: please let me hide tag excerpts. I know what c# is by now, no need to remind me every day that it's a multi-paradigm programming language... :-)
Another option would be to hide tag excerpts from tags which are in the favorite list.

To be fair, it's not the tag excerpt box per se which takes more space than before, but now there are additional UI elements that push the whole thing downwards, and there's too much empty space on the top of the page:

Also, the excerpt is on a light gray background, which emphasizes it. Overall, it feels much more prominent than before. I'd prefer the first question be higher up on the page - this is the important part after all.

EDIT: OldCurmudgeon's suggestion:

---

Just noticed the following (new vs old):

How to reproduce:

• Click on a tag
• Title says "New 'tag' questions - Stack Overflow"
• Click on the "new" tab
• Title now says "Stack Overflow"

Answer 2

Overall nice and an improvement over the old question lists, but one small feature request:

Please let us also save the tag choice (all, favorites, custom tags) in the same manner like the tab choice.

After each return to the list I have to choose my tag choice again.

Answer 3

I appreciate your attempt to improve navigation, but this interface is super confusing. I've been playing around with it for 10 minutes and I don't understand how it works.

The primary navigation element appears to be "new / popular / need answers" — effectively three "tabs" — on the left. Why is the Home icon with "new / popular / need answers" all the way on the right? Is the Home drop-down related to the tabs or not?

At the right, I see "recently active ▾". If I click on that, will it toggle the sort direction to "recently active ▴"? Hmm… that arrow isn't a sorting direction indicator after all.

If I click on the blue n bounties button, it switches me to the "need answers" tab, and the "recently active ▾" filter switches to "newest ▾". Despite being in the Need Answers tab, I see that some of the listed posts have answers, and some don't. There is, however, a "no answer" choice under the "bounties ▾" drop-down. Does "need answers" mean something unrelated to "no answer"?

The "Show/hide excerpts" widget acts more like two buttons than one toggle. As @HackerKarma has pointed out, clicking on the already-activated mode, instead of toggling the mode, refreshes the Hot Network Questions list, which enhances the mystery of what the widget is for.

---

What can be done to fix this mess?

My first suggestion is to simplify the drop-down menu with the Home icon. Just change it into a "bookmark the current view as my home page" button.

The other navigation elements should be reworked as one choice of mode, optionally filtered by other orthogonal criteria. Many clothes-shopping websites have this problem figured out, and people know how those sites work. Instead of shopping for clothes, we're just shopping for questions!

The n bounties button affects so many unrelated settings at once, which is disconcerting. It should probably be made into a top-level mode.

Answer 4

Can't say I'm overjoyed for these reasons:

1. Cramming question titles into even less horizontal space.

2. Loss of question first sentence preview which I found useful.

3. When I hit up my favourite tag wildcard (powershell*) I see the following which is quite broken in more ways than one:

Please don't ruin what was a perfectly good UI just for the sake of change.

Answer 5

On the whole, I think the new navigation makes it easier to find questions to answer. But it's made searching such a nightmare that I'm giving up on being a beta tester. Please don't make it the default until search is fixed!

The killer bug for me is that searching by tag is broken. Searching by tags is the main reason to use SE's built-in search — for plain text searches, search engines such as Google do a better job. So today I was looking for questions about exact-duplicates on MSE.

1. Click on the tag or type its name.
2. The post I'm looking for is likely to be a feature request. Let's restrict the search to that. Hey, where did the related tags go? Turns out they're hidden behind a completely unrelated feature.
3. Having found the related tags sidebar, I click on [feature-request]. Ha! I get redirected to a page which shows questions tagged [exact-duplicates] or [feature-request]. Sigh. Disjunction search on tags is something I use, what, once a month? It shouldn't be the default, and it especially makes no sense for a related tags click. At least this time the UI isn't so confusing, there are two buttons “any | all”, so I click on “all”.
4. The question I'm looking for might be in the [user-interface] tag. So I'll restrict to that by adding it to the search box. NOOOOOOOOO! It's brought me back to an “any” search. How many times do I need to tell you I want an “all” search? (Hint: once is already too much, more is aggravating.)
5. In the search results, switching to “newest” is a hassle. I want to switch the sorting order in search results about half the time, increasing the workload for that is not good.

Search by tags is broken is other ways, such as the variable brokenness of excluded tags.

I'm giving up on beta testing this. Sorry. I might give it another go when search by tags is fixed.

Answer 6

A nice improvement of the navigation and I want to use this thread to request personal saveable filters so I can store search conditions like [php] answers:0 newbie. That would help to navigate to things I'm intereset much more - and no the tag-shortcuts on the right side is not fully helping for such things. Even if a single tag-shortcuts can't combine multiple tags at once

Answer 7

This new navigation has quite a few great improvements and may confuse users until they get used to it. I see some good suggestions have already pointed out by members here in the answers.

I'm still learning and I will add more to this post as and when I learn something new. Here, I would like post few of my findings that I have noticed while I was going through my learning curve on this new navigation. Hope my findings will help some way:

1) need answers:

The "need answers" is new name for our old unanswered tab. The "need answers" now gives us two filter options on the right: (all the names are obtained by doing inspect element - don't know what are they officially called.)

• show-filter: a drop-down menu for selecting type of posts with options such as "all, no answer, bounties"
• sort-filter: a drop-down menu for sorting criteria with select options such as "newest, votes, ending, recently active, bounty size"

So, for example; If I want to display all the questions that need answers sorted by the "votes" then to achieve this, I will select the need answers tab and choose "all" option from the show-filter drop-down menu along with selecting "votes" from the sort-filter drop-down menu.

2) recently active:

This is a new name for our old "active" tab. But, there is one significant change here. Under the old active tab, all the posts were displayed as "modified" whereas in the new navigation all the posts show one of three statuses i.e. "answered", "asked" or "modified" (which is a broad term and covers many changes made to a post). This is a great improvement.

3) Navigation [new / popular / need answers]:

These primary navigation tabs on the left acts like a "you are here". Also corresponds to your "Home tab settings" you selected/set. (on the right, home icon).

Hope this helps to understand better.

Answer 8

Two things of note:

1. Posts I edited don't seem to be shown as "active" even a whole hour after (Observed when revising this MSO answer, other posts others edited were properly reactivated).

2. The new search seems strictly less powerful than the old one.

   While one can look at all macros questions which have c or c++ using the old nav, the new one makes a hash of it: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bc%5D+%5Bc%2B%2B%5D+%5Bmacros%5D

   That was a very useful feature, especially for handling retag-requests, burnination-requests and cleanup-requests.
   Or for finding that one elusive post you know you have seen.

Answer 9

Feedback. Favorite tags editor needs some work. I would remove it. Instead put a checkbox in the tag itself, not to delete de tag but to filter out tagged questions.

This is how it work right now.

Becomes