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!
The sidebar can help organize this, you can collapse sections, you can filter the links…
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!