We use contextual navigation in various parts of Discourse now (admin, documentation categories, chat, AI conversations)… one place with a lot of navigation we haven’t applied this yet is user profiles.
This is an area where we have quite a few links and the existing horizontal formatting has some downsides. There’s a lot going on here!
Using the sidebar this way isn’t without its own downsides, as it becomes less discoverable on small screens for example… but this is where your feedback can help!
This will become available as an experimental change when you update your Discourse site. An admin can enable it for everyone or for specific groups by visiting /admin/config/upcoming-changes and searching for sidebar user navigation
You can join the design experiments group to try it out here on Meta. Let us know what you think!
I don’t really think of those as “links”. They are more like menu items. It’s too bad you can’t have a full search/filter for all user settings, but maybe people don’t tweak settings enough to make it worth it.
Personally, I feel like “Badges” are the least important part of a profile, so I’d prefer if it was at the end of the list.
Thanks for working on this. It’s a big improvement.
I think this attempt is really good. Displaying the categories in the sidebar makes the user profile look very clean and tidy, and grouping the features into a single sidebar is very convenient to use.
However, the mobile experience feels a bit odd, possibly because the same button icons in the same location perform two different functions on different pages.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but maybe it’s just that I’m not used to it since it’s the first time trying this out.
Yes, agree that these sidebars aren’t great on mobile… it’s an odd experience to replace the hamburger menu contents without seeing the change, I think we’re going to need a different approach to pull the navs together specifically for small screens.
I quite like this new sidebar. Especially the link in the invites section for the redeemed invites, which otherwise can never be found unless you have a direct link.
Is it possible for like a ‘Show normal sidebar’ toggle in there to switch to the normal one so the user can navigate to other pages? Or does that not make much UX sense?
I’ve thought a lot about the general “back” button that has confused our less experienced users, and for now, the only thing I’ve come up with is to improve and unify as much as I can the styles of those “back” buttons (which vary depending on whether they are shown in Docs, Profile, or Chats).
Hopefully, a definitive and more robust solution will come along. I think it’s the only major pending improvement needed in Discourse’s UI/UX at a general level, so it can be used by “the average user” with no friction anymore.
