As one of the most-used components in Kentik Portal, we're always reluctant to change the Navigation menu and interrupt our users' habits. We're making an exception today, and bringing what we hope will be welcome changes to the Navigation menu. Read on.

Summary of Changes

As can be seen in (3) we've moved your recently viewed Dashboards and Saved Views to the bottom right side of the navigation menu, with the intent of some day removing it altogether – its functionality has been ported to the search bar, which allows you to directly access a longer list of recently viewed content (see this article).

Where these recents used to be located, you'll notice two unfolding menu entries now: "Top Talkers" and "Settings", as displayed in (1), we'll get to that.

Lastly, we noticed a significant portion of our users did not realize some navigation category headers in the central panel were clickable links to Status/Summary screens. To help make this more obvious, we've now used a standard link coloring on them, as can be seen in (2).

New Expandable Top Talkers Menu

Upon hovering on the "Top Talkers" item in (1), the central panel will update with a list of available Top Talker aggregate views. Up until now, these have been rather hidden in our UI, and the only way they could be accessed was:

1. by navigating to them in Network Explorer,
2. as a Favorite Page for the users who have already favorited them (meaning they appear right away in the Search results empty state), or
3. by clicking on a well hidden drop-down menu in the Network Explorer landing page as depicted below

With this release, we are now making them available directly from the Navigation menu. Hovering on the "Top Talkers" item in (1) will swap the navigation central panel to a list of these available Aggregate Pages – see screenshot below:

New Expandable Settings Menu

As we were designing the Top Talker's menu UX, we also looked at product usage analytics and confirmed that one of the most-used screens was the Settings screen. Knowing this screen is barely a list screen, we decided to save our users multiple clicks a day by using the same paradigm and populate the central navigation panel with all available Setting screens directly from the navigation menu – see screenshot below:

What do you think?

We hope these small changes will make your Kentik Portal experience even more efficient without disrupting your familiar navigation patterns. What do you think ?