RFC: Menu navigation - Search & go component

I don’t like this.

Let me explain, I do encourage you to improve things and being a UNIX terminal guy, I do more typing than clicking so this should align with me. But I feel like this is a “patch” and we should be fixing the root cause: our menu structure is terrible.

I constantly look for Operating system/Architecture/Templates in Infrastructure, I am always clicking on “Sync Plan” instead “Sync Status”, I need to think twice before I start navigating thinking “oh yeah this one is in the huge Host menu”.

I tried to pursue some change but I quickly dropped the ball. It was just a huge bite for me, this definitely needs a proper UX research and better planning. The change would also involve changing our documentation, we have so many menu references in there!

Also, I am not a UX expert by any means, but when we present two text boxes on a page (e.g. on a host page), users will be accidentally typing search terms into this new text box and vice versa. We might make things actually even worse.

However I do believe that “global search” would be a great idea. One search box to rule them all, this is the dream design and if we had that, that could work pretty well. Type “m templa” to search in the menu, type “h qa123” to search in hosts or just start typing to search for everything. But we would need to merge searching from all pages, I am not sure how feasible this is. Considering plugins support, this might be a huge bite.

2 Likes