Findings from the usability study at the University of Minnesota 2011

Participants were asked to create an "About Us" page that was accessible from the main menu (We did not use the word "Main menu" in the task). Half of the participants expected to make a menu first. Some of the participants had the mental model of creating a structural framework of the website then work with the appearance. Going back to the menu/page issue, currently there is no way to know that you have to create a page first and then link it to the main menu. You just have to know! Unfortunately, the first time user clearly does not understand and is against their natural way of thinking.

Again, this is an important issue and requires your feedback. As like any other issue, this one too has several approaches which could be tried; pragmatic or ideal.

One of the way could be to develop contextual way to add basic pages from the homepage e.g. (+) button next to the tab. Although this issue somewhat solves the problem it does not eradicate it. Because the intent should be to make the users learn the creating menu process for a long term and also the (+) button could get potentially be confused with respect to interaction with the shortcuts. That being said, this is a good option to explore and tweak !

Comments

yoroy’s picture

Version: 7.x-dev » 8.x-dev

Moving to d8.

dcmistry’s picture

Peeps, comments?

rupertj’s picture

This is an issue that we found at SubHub while developing our new Drupal 7 based platform. We took the approach of letting users add new menus while they're creating content, and then directing new users towards the add content page, so they don't get hung up trying to add a page that doesn't exist yet in the menu editor.

The flow works like this:

The node form, with menu fields:
http://skitch.com/rupertj/fn92y/edit-existing-page

Open the controls to add a new menu:
http://skitch.com/rupertj/fn92g/edit-existing-page

The new menu, created and selected:
http://skitch.com/rupertj/fn92m/edit-existing-page

So, this lets the user add a menu item into a new or existing menu while they're creating content. The new item appears as the last first level element - if that's not the desired location, the user's obviously free to use the existing menu editor to rearrange the items. (Allowing them to place the new item in a specific place in the menu while creating content felt too complex).

Jeff Burnz’s picture

I tend to think this should postpone based in the outcome of #1101600: Users need to be able to select from list when adding menu items to a menu, in particular see comment #30: http://drupal.org/node/1101600#comment-4551088

dcmistry’s picture

Ideally, we should be able to map the user mental model of how they create a menu but we do not have a lot of information regarding that. Also, it is not that easy to change it and it would significantly affect our existing users who have learned one way of doing things.
That being said, what we could do is - we should inform the users (via text, visually, or something else) how they could create a menu (if not map to their model).

casey’s picture

Idea (dunno if it is stupid):

Add "Add %content_type" actions to the menu-links-configuration pages for every content type that is allowed to be added to that menu. Those actions redirect to node/add/$content_type?menu=$menu and prefill some menu link settings.

Those actions could also be added to contextual links of menu blocks.

yoroy’s picture

somebody just asked in IRC:
"Is there a way of bypassing the "The path is either invalid or you do not have access to" thingy when creating menu items that points to a page not yet created? I'm on Drupal 7. I modify the paths later depending on what subpage the user is on, so I don't want to enter another path here before that happens."

somebody answered:
THAT is annoying. I tend to use as a placeholder. D7 also deletes menu items if you delete what they are pointing to, so you have to remember what menus you had if you delete/remake a page :(

catch’s picture

xjm’s picture

Added a meta issue for all the menu UX issues:
#1541264: [META] Menu UX improvements

sun’s picture

Issue tags: +Blocks-Layouts
YesCT’s picture

I could look around for someone to code up a patch for one of the approaches.

Is " (+) button next to the tab." from the issue summary the thing to try still?

tim.plunkett’s picture

Category: task » feature

At this point, this sounds like a feature.

webchick’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

This is definitely not a feature, but I actually think this is a duplicate of some combination of #308263: Allow privileged users to bypass the validation of menu items and #1101600: Users need to be able to select from list when adding menu items to a menu. Or at least, if those were fixed, this would become a non-issue.

webchick’s picture

Category: feature » task