Improve the top-nav menu of the docs

[rfraposa]

It's been a couple of months now, and I've tried to give the new top-nav menu a chance - but I have to say that I wish we could go back to the way it was. A few reasons why:

1. The drop-down menus are a visual "noise" that get in the way -and I find myself never clicking on them
2. I know exactly which pages I want to go to, and still struggle to find the right link. I can only imagine how difficult it is for new users to find something - it's like you almost have to know exactly what all the top categories mean
3. There are so many options on the top-nav that they don't fit across the browser - they spill over to a 2nd row

It just felt easier and smoother before this change. I know a lot of effort went into it, and I definitely appreciate the attempt (we should always strive to improve things!), but my opinion is that this new nav is worse than it used to be - and we should either go back to the "old" nav or iterate this new nav to be more functional and user-friendly.

@tbragin @gjones @Blargian

[gjones]

I tend to agree with you @rfraposa, it's also broken in multiple places on mobile. It's something that both @gingerwizard and I have discussed too. We have a new web engineer role open and once we fill that there will be more bandwidth to make these changes. That said, perhaps the three of us can sync and figure out what we can do in the short term. Do we know if we've established any KPIs when we made this nav change? I would like to double check that it hasn't improved things before we yank it.

[gingerwizard]

Im mixed here - i prefer the current design but also it is far from imperfect in its layout and is is poor on mobile.

However, i dont think we can realistically return to the status quo and the issues this involved. Its easy to forget the challenges this had in terms of scalability and finding pages for new users who have specific roles.

I'm not in favor of returning to a single flat left navigation. Others like https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform have had success with 2 dimensional layout and we have too many pages now for a single list - and more adding all the time. It worked if you knew what you were looking for but was ineffective for new users.

Right now we have other priorities in terms of the content backlog, poor search and massively dated docosauraus version (which now is hurting us re vulnerabilities).

When we revisit, lets do once we have the web engineer to move to v3.

[gingerwizard]

Worth noting we're also adding breadcrumbs shortly and landing pages (with Toc) for each left header root item - i think this will help with navigation.

(3) we can address
(2) - reverting wont help. IT might help you @rfraposa Terrible search is the main pain here imo.
(1) - we can consider dropping these. agreed, minimal value.

[rfraposa]

Maybe two small fixes that could make a big improvement: 1) we get rid of the drop-downs, and 2) we shorten the menu so that it doesn't spill over to a second line (in a "normal" sized browser). So maybe no more than 6 top-level options.

[tbragin]

Team - We just completed nav refresh project, and as I know the change was socialized broadly, so I a bit surprised to hear the feedback from @rfraposa and @gjones that they fundamentally don't like this organization, after the change is implemented.

At this point, I agree with @gingerwizard that we do not have the cycles to do another nav refresh and have other more fundamental and pressing issues to address when it comes to the docs.

As @gingerwizard mentioned, the design is used by documentation from projects like Supabase, so clearly others have found success with it. My preference is to incrementally improve the current navigation rather than go back to what we had. If the design needs to be improved when it comes to the mobile experience, let's invest in that.

Thank you @rfraposa for making concrete suggestions already about how to improve existing design. Let's focus on this direction.

[gingerwizard]

Lets fix the spilling over asap @Blargian Im not going to remove drop downs for now without a broader consensus @rfraposa we will discuss more widely amongst the team

[gingerwizard]

We've addressed some of the concerns here, id encourage people to try new menus for desktop and mobile. We are planning to move to more a use case/tutorial style seperation on the top menu. Lets take to a new ticket.