I made a similar proposal a while back:
but I like how your proposal is less radical. I especially like the on-demand hamburger. I forgot that was a thing until recently when I was reminded of it by Amazon as well.
See that drop-down menu directly under the logo?
Scroll down a bit, aaand: Hamburger!
(For reasons I don’t understand however, they completely drop the sticky topnapv on mobile).
I think the design is fine as it stands as far as a first iteration goes. This, to me, is greatly preferable over the current solution.
- The addition of Latest, Top, New, Unread makes it something I might actually use.
- The “pop-in” nature of it improves discoverability slightly.
- The new space on the right leaves up room for a much more inviting search button.
As for your RFC:
I’d say just have it show everything for starters to keep it simple. Solving this problem more elegantly will require more radical changes I think. I’m pondering a unification of a left-hand hamburger and sticky index nav.
I don’t really understand what you mean here. I do think that menu still gets way too much screen estate though.
This should be a per-forum kind of thing imo. Frankly, here on Meta we might as well be seeing sub-categories at all times, because there’s only like 7-8 or them.