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Comment by victorwu | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback regarding the sidebar navigation! Here's the issue that we used to chat extensively about it and came to our current design here in 9.0: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26200

There's lots of discussion there. We went with a design that leans on getting out of your way and recovers some screen real-estate. We do recognize the one additional click required though. And we are actively listening to feedback and will continue to iterate.

We're working hard to improve usability and navigation in general. In addition to this sidebar change, we've made many nav updates: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26348.

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The application I'm working on, I went with a 3-state navigation... null (default), true (open) or false (closed) ... at large screen sizes null is a soft open, smaller soft closed... toggling goes between the respective hard state and the null/default state. At sm-medium, it's an overlay, at phone/xs it takes over the screen.

I find that this is more intuative to use than a hard on/off only.

I agree with the parent about the sidebar. I already disliked the change to make it hidden by default with the pin option since it was a bit inconsistent for me, but it at least gave the option for best of both worlds.

Ideally this should be an option. I get that 'modern UX' is all about more screen space and whatnot, but I'm not a fan of that trend personally. It seems that all that's been gained from that change is more empty space at the side of pages. Personally, I'm the type that would rather have more information and convenience on the page than extra space.

Would it be that hard to add an option to enable the side bar if people want it? That's what I like about GitLab, that it's very configurable.

Trading usability for screen real-estate? Sounds like your designers have gone off the deep end and fail to realize that Gitlab is a productivity tool, not an art piece.

That's quite a bold statement from an armchair UX designer. They obviously have reasoning and supporting data, maybe you're in the minority of users who've found that useful?

Thanks for the feedback! In this iteration, we think recovering more space helps users focus on content, and allows them to see more content at once. Definitely we recognize the tradeoff of additional clicks and discoverability as a result.

We are definitely focused on usability, and navigation in general. We don't claim to know all the right answers all the time. So we are iterating with each release, and working hard doing user research as well to inform our decisions. You can see some of our recent work regarding nav here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/3. Thanks.

I'd argue that extra screen real estate for the content that matters often lends itself toward better UX, but any specific suggestions for improvements would be appreciated. :)

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