Tim's Weblog
Tim Strehle’s links and thoughts on Web apps, software development and Digital Asset Management, since 2002.
2014-01-22

Simpler DAM UI: Main navigation (2)

We’re still discussing the main navigation of our simple DAM UI. The first draft of the navigation looks okay to us, but the dropdown to the left of the search box might not be noticed by everyone.

Our friends and customers at Bauer Media recommended that we add a list of asset types (Articles, Images, Pages, more…) between search form and search result. This would be easy to spot and require just one click to repeat the current search in a different asset “pool”.

Taking this one step further, the asset types are not the only way of filtering search results. In the current UI, DC-X offers four (configurable) metadata fields to filter on. That many filter options take a lot of screen space: Other Web sites often move them into a left column, and that’s what we’ve done in the current draft (see the screenshot above). Search results have a narrow column on the left side with filter options, including asset types (or more generic, “channels” in DC-X terms). The dropdown in the header can still be used (from any page) to jump to a certain section of the site.

We also removed the second search input field, which looked a bit confusing (but had the advantage of being larger than the small text field we’re able to cram into the header). If this approach works out, there’s no need for a separate “search form”; we’ve got the fulltext search field in the header and all other search restrictions in the left column.

As always, your feedback is highly appreciated…