Feedback Request: How's the New Navigation Working for You?
Hello Champions! Reaching out for a quick pulse check. How are is the new navigation working for you? Would love to hear aha moments in the comments! 😃
Hello Champions! Reaching out for a quick pulse check. How are is the new navigation working for you? Would love to hear aha moments in the comments! 😃
So far it's working well overall for me. One thing I would like to be able to do is reorder the top nav (Data, Highlights, Inisghts). There are projects for me where I would like to have the Insights or the Highlights as the first things that show up when someone navigated to a project. For example, for a wrapped up project, I would like a stakeholder to immediately see the insights of the project, not the raw data. Other than this, so far so good
It's generally been well received so far! A few quick things:
We have a lot of feeds, as we are creating them for each of our CS team members so that they can stay on top of research from customers. They have to horizontally scroll to find their name, which can be challenging and a bit time consuming.
I find myself looking for the "contacts" frequently. It feels a bit hidden in the "More" area.
I personally tend to use "browse" a lot more than "Your Work" as the "Your Work" is ordered by last updated. With a lot of others using Dovetail, it's hard to find what I need. It therefore prefer using the folder structure in the "Browse" area.
I admit that I often lose the "Customize" placement in the project and struggle to remember where to turn on each "overview" "data" etc. It would be cool if these could be setup to default on a global basis (maybe they can and I just didn't discover how to do it). And ability to reorder these as Faidon L. mentioned 💯
Thanks for the feedback Faidon L. and Danielle R. I have a few questions Danielle R. 😄
Would you find it useful if you could “favourite” feeds?
When you use Browse, do you find that more useful than saving the item to your sidebar?
I would love a favourite option for feeds! This would help a ton with our use case.
Hmm good question - I haven't thought about that. We do tend to use the pinned folders in our browse section, so it would be nice if they were even in a sub menu under Browse in the left side bar. We tend to have a lot of projects in parallel across different teams, so I prefer pinning/saving the folder versus the project in case that helps.
To be honest, I’ve been putting off trying the beta because I’ve been under deadline and could not afford to be slowed down because I am so used to working with the current Dovetail. I finally have bandwidth to try it this sprint as I am responsible for helping our org’s teams get onboarded to the new experience. I appreciate the email that got sent out today with training materials, it will make my life a little easier! I will report back to you this week — appreciate you asking folks!
I’ll be honest, I don’t like the switch so far. It upends the longstanding pattern of global navigation at the top (horizontally) and contextual navigation on the side (vertically). I also found it helpful to have, as someone described, a table of contents within a project, all laid out. Hiding views in menus makes it harder to “see” what’s within each section. Maybe there was good reason to change things up, backed by research, but I wonder if it’s tipping too far into making the experience easier for non-researchers while making it harder for researchers. My experience and opinion may change as I use it more, and help other people within my org use it. I try to have an open mind! 😅
ooofff I just signed in and I have no idea where my saved views are for data, tags, etc. I was really relying on those views. Are they gone?
Tanya Rabourn they are hidden in one of the horizontal menus
Oh the drop down. Yeah, this isn’t the appropriate interaction for views. It shouldn’t be a drop down. I use my actual list of views as a way of sorting some foundations for insights so having this list hidden makes it difficult
big plus on what’s already been mentioned about the switch to the top navigation! just want to emphasize that, in our case, we’re now left with 2 drop downs that appear indistinguishable to the average user: the left-most is to navigate the views and has the same name as the filter drop-down (because in our case, the views are named after the fields). i’ve seen users consistently go to the filter drop-down to “change the view”, instead of the navigation drop-down 😭 (of course, we will have to adjust our navigation and rename things…)
Unfortunately this horizontal menu relies on recall vs recognition which requires more effort to retrieve memories, which in turn requires education and training on our part. It’s made even harder because the view menu’s title changes based on the view you are in. It’s really disorienting.