Foreman vertical navigation

Development
,
1

Hello all,

Recently I’ve been looking at my experiences with the vertical navigation when comparing a 1.16 installation with the development version. I’ve noticed that I’m always lost in the development version. Partially this can be explained with not using it enough to get familiar, but there are other things:

Delay

In 1.16 there is no mouse over delay. This makes it much faster to correct a selection or look for what you need. In vertical navigation there is a delay and that really slows down.

Reading order

The reading order is very weird when you have section headers

x  ----> ...
         ...
         ...
         Puppet
         ...
         <item>

While you often look diagonally as well skipping the headers.

Compare this to

x
...
...
...
Puppet
...
<item>

I think this causes less mental effort to process. That makes me think we should not use section headers in sub menus and more top level items or tertiary menus instead of a header.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
2

[ekohl] ekohl https://community.theforeman.org/u/ekohl Installer
August 13

Hello all,

Recently I’ve been looking at my experiences with the vertical
navigation when comparing a 1.16 installation with the development
version. I’ve noticed that I’m always lost in the development version.
Partially this can be explained with not using it enough to get
familiar, but there are other things:

Delay

In 1.16 there is no mouse over delay. This makes it much faster to
correct a selection or look for what you need. In vertical navigation
there is a delay and that really slows down.

3

There is a PR open where this seems to already be considered: https://github.com/theforeman/foreman/pull/5898

4

The delay was initially part of the implementation of patternfly, but now it’s configurable. However, as bastilian mentions, we’re now switching to using patternfly-react.

I also hate the delay. I’d really like to see the nav have no delay, or a Foreman setting to configure the delay.

5

hoverDelay has been set to 0ms in my PR

probably removing the WIP label today.

regarding the reading order:
are you suggesting taking an accordion approach instead?

6

I’m not sure what would be a good solution (UX is not my expertise) but I have noticed that I lost items like Classes. This is under the Puppet section and obviously it’s only together that it makes sense (i.e. Puppet Classes). Perhaps it’s because the 1.16 menu I was looking at was much shorter so fewer distractions.