CUNY Academic Commons

+1 on dropping Papers in favor of Courses, though then there's no way to get to the global Papers directory through the top-level nav. Perhaps we leave Papers in the toolbar dropdown?

Seems to me that removing About would remove a lot of valuable information for first-time visitors to the site.

I've added Sonja as a watcher.

Boone Gorges wrote:

+1 on dropping Papers in favor of Courses, though then there's no way to get to the global Papers directory through the top-level nav. Perhaps we leave Papers in the toolbar dropdown?

Seems to me that removing About would remove a lot of valuable information for first-time visitors to the site.

I've added Sonja as a watcher.

For now, I think we should replace Papers with Courses and leave About

I wonder if we could remove the "Home" nav item. The logo is linked to the homepage, that is a common nav pattern people are used to. When someone is logged in to the Commons website, the top left dropdown item (text "CUNY Academic Commons" is also linked to the homepage.

Do we have any analytics on how many people use the "Papers" nav item? It will likely upset a lot of users if we simply remove that nav item and don't find a good way for them to get to papers.

Alternatively we could create a nav item that groups things like Groups, Sites, Papers in a sub nav and leave People and Courses as a main nav item?

Thoughts?

Sonja, I dug into our analytics and it looks like we don't currently track navigation click events. We can tell when users went from the home page to the Groups directory (for example) but we don't know if that happened through the header nav, or the toolbar, or some other way. I've added GA events for toolbar nav clicks and header nav clicks in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/26dfa04963ae3d2d589bd401e5c6848bbfa7843e and https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/5b60aedde758a6133d3b42dbf82d208f2732dc16; I'll go ahead and backport these for the 1.13.11 release so that we can start collecting data.

The Papers directory does get some traffic, but it's about 20% of what the other top-level directory links get (Sites, Members, Groups). An option is to remove Papers from the header nav but to leave it in the toolbar dropdown at the upper left (though this breaks the parallel structure of these two navs).

Removing Home sounds promising to me, though Matt should sign off on that.

Boone Gorges wrote:

The Papers directory does get some traffic, but it's about 20% of what the other top-level directory links get (Sites, Members, Groups). An option is to remove Papers from the header nav but to leave it in the toolbar dropdown at the upper left (though this breaks the parallel structure of these two navs).

Thanks for looking into the analytics and adding tracking event for the nav and header clicks! That will be very helpful in the future.
To the 20%, really all depends on the total number, 20% sounds like a big number when it comes to interaction with a section of the site. I agree breaking the parallel structure of the two navs isn't a great idea since users will expect to find all nav links in both menus.

Looking forward to hearing what Matt thinks of removing the Home item, or alternatively my thoughts on grouping things like Sites, Groups, etc. in a dropdown.

Hi All --

I find Sonja's argument about removing "Home" convincing, so I am in favor of that.

I am also inclined to remove Papers from the main nav, though I would love to see some data on analytics for that and I take Chris's point that we'd have to find a place to put it. Making it a sub-nav item of Courses seems promising to me. Let's wait, say, 7-10 days and see what the numbers look like.

As for the rest of the proposals:

-- Perhaps we should retitle "News" "Activity"?
-- At least at the moment, i'm reluctant to merge or de-emphasize groups and sites, as they are a key part of how the CAC works
-- I like keeping About in a prominent place, as I think we are foregrounding in that section the community-oriented nature of the project -- it's not just a piece of software developed outside of our community but is developed by our own internal team, and the statements we make a bout the commons there are important to its identity

But we should continue to review this all and think about options. Sonja, we have long had a review/refresh of our information architecture on our list of tasks for the redesign project, so I would love to hear continued thoughts from you, Chris, and Boone about this all.

Sorry for my late response, seems the response I've tried to post on Friday didn't post :/

Chris Stein wrote:

In looking at this again I wonder if it's time to remove News. There are two issues with it from a UX perspective. One is that it's not really news, it's an activity feed that is auto-generated. I haven't done any testing but I wonder if an academic audience thinks of a curated news feed with that title. The second is that the sub-nav for Twitter, that page is broken. If we get it working it might function better linked from somewhere on the home page.

I think that's a good question – "what does our academic audience expect when they see News?" – but it sounds like a bigger project for another release. I would encourage you to open a new ticket for this and do some research around this.

I do still see about as an option and as a point of clarification, I'm not suggesting we totally remove it but instead put it in the footer.

Though About could naturally be something users expect in the footer, if they can't find it in the main navigation, I see one major issue with this move. About in the main navigation has sub nav items. The way the footer navigation is currently setup, doesn't accommodate for sub navigation or additional links. Where would those links go?

Matt Gold wrote:

But we should continue to review this all and think about options. Sonja, we have long had a review/refresh of our information architecture on our list of tasks for the redesign project, so I would love to hear continued thoughts from you, Chris, and Boone about this all.

Do we have a separate issue for IA already? If not I'm happy to set one up and start working on it once the 1.14 release is launched. I think in that case we shouldn't just yet remove Papers and revisit during the reevaluation / redesign of the nav.

Boone Gorges wrote:

I've attached screenshots of loggedin/loggedout state, desktop and mobile, so you can see the effects.

These are looking good!

In mid-October, I'll check analytics for the new nav click events.

See reply to Matt's comment about Papers above.

very interesting. thank you, Boone.

Thanks Boone for these insights! Very interesting indeed!
For a future nav design considerations it would be interesting to look at the numbers of all individual nav items on the main nav and the admin nav. You mentioned the admin nav is accessible across all sites – can you specify the "all" in this context? And if it makes sense, is there a way to track which sites it's used on the most.

the admin bar also has two parts -- the part aligned to the left, which replicates the main site nav bar, and the part on the right near the avatar, which has the "My Sites" etc. I'm assuming we can differentiate between those, too?

Click events anywhere on the toolbar are registered as the same sorts of events in GA, but we know which specific item is clicked (eg Groups vs My Groups) so it would be possible to filter them out. It's for this reason too why it's not quite apples-to-apples - the toolbar offers much more functionality than the main site nav. I have not filtered the data to try for a more direct comparison.

Boone Gorges wrote:

By "all sites" I mean that the toolbar is visible across all subsites in the network. So, for example, at https://gcenglish.commons.gc.cuny.edu you can see the menu at the upper-right - see screenshot.

Yes, it'd probably be possible to track patterns in how it's used, but we'd need to ask specific questions - is it used most frequently from specific subdomains, from the Dashboard vs the front end, by certain kinds of users, etc. Feel free to start collecting thoughts like this in #10580.

Thanks for the clarification and for creating a new ticket!