On the Automic documentation site, the new navigation pane is inferior to the old one in several ways:
- Much less information is displayed in a given amount of screen space, because the font size is larger and there is more blank space between entries. As a result, it is harder to see the context of any individual document, and it is harder to find a desired document without lots of scrolling.
- Names that are too long to be displayed are wrapped onto the next line, taking up even more space and making use of space even less efficient.
- It is not possible to collapse or resize the navigation pane, so there is no way to prevent the wrapping of names.
- The book & page icons that used to provide information about which pages had sub-pages are gone, replaced by tiny gray disclosure triangles inexplicably placed to the right of categories rather than the left.
The design change appears to have been motivated by a desire to present a "cleaner" or more sparse interface. This puts form before function, and sacrifices the whole purpose of a documentation site for no obvious gain.
I suggest that the folks responsible for Automic documentation seriously reconsider these design choices.
Ping
@Gabi Oberreiter.
Old design
New design
