Modernize Admin Nav

[s3w47m88]

This is apart of a bigger project for my staff and I, you can find the context here ​https://www.theportlandcompany.com/2017/09/10/proposed-improvements-to-the-wordpress-ui/.

Our goal is to clean up the UI with two principles in mind:

• Context Visibility - Only show something when it's in context.
• Add With Purpose - If something, such as padding or margins, don't serve a purpose, don't add them.
• Simplify Number of Actions - If a step can be avoided in a process, avoid it.

This ticket pertains to enhancing, modernizing, the existing admin navigation.

For context, visit our website, shrink to mobile dimensions and select the nav in the upper right, then a sub nav item. Also review ShiftNav - ​https://shiftnav.io/pro.

Then compare this to the current wp admin menu, *especially* on mobile. It's pretty painful! Here's the problems we see (followed with some solutions):

• Currently the WP admin menu is single-tier.
• - This forces many developers to create a parent-level menu when they would prefer, or could otherwise, place it under a more appropriate context.
• - It also forces developers to move their navigation entirely out of the menu and into the main body. This varies from page and Plugin creating *massive* confusion for Users.
• Every new menu item increases the required amount of scrolling.
• On mobile, there is no sub item indicator beside parent pages that have sub items.
• There is no transition effect when expanding sub menus, leaving a "jolt" feeling, sometimes resulting in people thinking they're waiting or it's broken (especially on mobile where the expanded menu can expand below the viewable area.
• Expanding one sub menu does not collapse another. We can't think of a use case where having both is necessary, but it does require the user to scroll to the other menu(s) and click collapse, creating extra steps that could be avoided it they automatically close when another item is expanded.

We propose introducing a similar experience to Shiftnav on the back end.

We would be happy to provide designs and built this as a feature-as-Plugin if the Core leadership are willing to approve it.

[melchoyce]

Hey @s3w47m88, have you seen the Design Experiments plugin? ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/design-experiments/

The goal is to have a place to try out different ideas to improve the admin design. You can get involved and add your own experiments on GitHub: ​https://github.com/WordPress/design-experiments.

Because this particular ticket is very large in scope, I'm going to close it. The other tickets you've created are a much more approachable size.