Reposting after subscribing to the design list.
On 04/25/2013 10:39 AM, Jon Robson wrote:
I'm beginning to exhibit raging hatred of the right nav concept...
Firstly.. Ergg. two settings is confusing (site and user) - they should be the same page and there is no reason why they can't be. It would be great if when logged in the settings page morphed from device specific to user specific. Would be great to be able to activate alpha on all my devices.
I agree with everything, but "raging hatred" :)
In terms of a right nav, the more I think about it and having played with a prototype I knocked up, the more I think a right nav is bad. Although it seems to be becoming an established pattern it seems like an easy option that in my opinion is badly implemented. We can do better and should lead by example. For one I never touch the Facebook one... it just doesn't come natural. I also don't like the idea of 2 menus. I wonder if we could envision 2 stacked menus that can be toggled between and persist when selected.
Or possibly have some menu options hidden? Sort them by what user taps most often (or would it be confusing?). Or maybe just do what we first thought about and divide the menu into two sections for now (even without section titles, they don't seem necessary). There's still some room in the menu on a typical smartphone screen.
I would still reserve the space on the right side for something like notifications icon (like this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Athena-Wikimania-2012-Echo-BrandonHarris.... but more mobile friendly).
Also, when you say Facebook do you mean their mobile web site or the app? The site doesn't have any right menu for menu so I guess the latter.
The thing that bugs me most is that when you move your finger over the left hamburger button and press it the page moves to the left. Your finger is still above the button. This doesn't apply to the right menu. Your finger is now above something else. This to me is very jarry and always feels icky.
I don't understand. When I press our current hamburger, the page moves to the right and my finger is over the Home button...
It still leaves the question of where things such as watch star, talk page link, edit, move and delete buttons go. The bottom would make sense for an app, but position fixed is buggy in the majority of current mobile browsers and we will need a fallback of some sort.
I'm not saying that I'd like them to be using position: fixed, but it's been really bothering me for a long time that we can't use it reliably. I propose a spike to check again if there is a good solution to this problem (maybe a JS lib) or how difficult it would be to implement a fallback (recalculating position on scroll). Should I write a Mingle card?