UX Roadmap for the Admin Interface

I recently joined Stembolt as their first user experience designer. I'll be working on client sites eventually, but in the meantime I've been getting friendly with the Solidus admin. I already have ideas on improving inconsistent labels, unintuitive interfaces and other future enhancements. I've also gained insight on navigation and other interface elements from email, Slack and GitHub chats with companies using Solidus. Special thanks to Thomas von Deyen from magic labs for his feedback so far.

The high level plan is to adjust the global structure of the site and clean up inconsistencies so that we have a solid base to build on. Then we'll be able to tighten up interactions and polish individual pages. A new visual design palette will help the user focus on the content area and better recognize interactive elements on the page.

Stembolt already has developers putting effort into these changes and many are on track to be included in the 1.2 release of Solidus. Some improvements include:

• moving the top navigation to the left side for easier extensibility
• including a flyout on that navigation for efficient access to sub nav items with fewer clicks (read: page loads)
• making that navigation collapsible so that it uses less space when not needed
• creating a 'sticky header' to hold the title and action buttons that will always be in view
• creating a 'sticky footer' to hold page navigation and flash messages

Here's an early wireframe of that layout.

Kevin Attfield, a developer at Stembolt, took this wireframe and the current colour palette to create a left side navigation.

We're currently gathering feedback regarding the order and grouping of menu items so that we can make them more intuitive for admin users. Much prettier than wireframes, I've also started drawing mockups for what it could look like with a new colour palette. This is still a work in progress, but this is what I've put together so far.

There are plans to move add and edit functions into the page that they're affecting and to cleanup the way those forms are presented. Search filter layout is under scrutiny and fields may be added or removed depending on their usefulness. I also hope to clean up inconsistencies in labels, error messaging, and field validation to make the admin more intuitive to use.

We're implementing these changes in small chunks and multiple phases. This, coupled with our documentation, should make upgrading more manageable than some of the huge sweeping changes we've seen in the past.

All these items are being discussed or will be posted for discussion in the Solidus GitHub. If you'd like to share your opinion on how our improvements will affect how you use Solidus, come over and join the conversation.