A sense of place: Meta's new sidebar

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I’m also still exploring it myself :slight_smile: We have used it for some time on a sandbox, but it’s always different on the real live site. My feelings so far:

  • I love the dynamic navigation. I think it surfaces the actual community map much better than the sidebar links or the category page. As a user I feel it gives me a better understanding where I am and where I can go. As an admin on Meta, I think it helps us further clarify the architecture.

  • Also love the Resources panel. We’ve added custom resources on three spaces so far, but here as well, it’s a great tool to surface the resources we currently have. Which then helps us discover inconsistencies and outdated content and improve on them.

  • I think custom leaderboards are a great use case as well. We had the ability to scope leaderboards to categories for a while, but we also need to show these leaderboards in the right context. Otherwise we just link to a list of leaderboards from the left sidebar. As with the other panels so far, this also put a spotlight on the feature and surfaced that category scoping of leaderboards doesn’t work reliably right now.

  • I feel showing global content on the category panels doesn’t add much value though. So the events panel feels a bit redundant. On the Featured Topics panel we do show a category scoped filter of hot topics by default, but it also feels a bit too generic to me. I think this panel becomes much more interesting with very unique filters and panel titles that explain them. Like showing topics that are waiting for a solution after x hours. Showing PRs from the community. Or the most liked ideas.

So overall I think the further direction is to show more unique content and also more unique panels on each space.

Dynamically hiding the sidebar is unfortunately not something we can quickly add as a feature. The reason is that we don’t have a good pattern for this. We hide the left sidebar with a menu icon on the header, we can’t apply that elsewhere. I think we need to explore a more generic solution for showing and hiding a contextual sidebar to make this work well.

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