Global navigation update - public beta feedback

[justinbyo]

Thanks for trying out the new and improved global navigation. We’re excited for you to try out improvements we’ve made to the navigation across every page in the product, including breadcrumbs for better wayfinding, enhanced menus with links to users’ workflows across the product, improved accessibility, and a new coat of paint 🎨

Please add your feedback or any bug reports as a comment below. Thanks and happy coding!

🚀 May 8th update: Based on your feedback, we've made the first round of updates. Read this comment for more.

Enabling the global navigation update

You can experience the new global navigation public beta by going to feature preview and enabling "Global navigation update."

[fabiohcnobre]

I liked the menu was cleaner.

[NoaBrecht]

I do like the new update. In my eyes it looks much more modern and clean.

[MhizMartha]

Nice one

[Fdawgs]

Old menu was a lot cleaner, and options are now hidden down in menus.
The slide-in motion of the side-menus is also quite jarring.

I can't be the only one who clicks on the GitHub icon in the top left to return home?
This new navigation now requires two clicks to get back to home over one.

[shoma-mano]

I want to pin some repositories in left side bar.

[johngagefaulkner]

I want to pin some repositories in left side bar.

💡 Great idea! Allow us to have a "pinned" section where we can pin whatever we want.

[georgearnall]

I use the pull requests link all the time, that needs to be one click away.

[ngr]

Yeah. Either pinning or at least bring back the recent repos.
It should be either one click or quick keyboard navigation.

Used to be: / + first letters of repo + Enter
Now: / + Cmd+Backspace + first letters of repo + Enter

[frobnitzem]

I stumbled on this conversation and suddenly realized why I've been using the github web UI less lately.
Moving panes, pop-up side-windows, scrolling shortcuts. Why? I want my web pages to be as close to static as possible.

I think a majority of the responses here are echoing the sentiment that they want a navbar at the top, and a file / discussion display on the bottom - not a mini window manager or a news reader. I do like dark mode though.

Some notes for keeping your users from cursing at you behind your back in the future:

• If you didn't change the feature set, don't change the menu.
• Don't make major changes to the feature set.
• Whatever you do, keep the text labels on nav elements. I will not use mouse-over to navigate by pictograms.

[xt0rted]

The slide overs are incredibly annoying and I hate that the logo doesn't take me back to the dashboard. The only thing in that slide over I'll ever click on is the home link.

[imgradeone]

yeah i would like to have anything else and let the logo to go home, it's an habit on every website logo=home So make logo=menu will annoy off many user.

At least let us change this behaviors in the settings, logo=home + hamburger menu, or like now.

@BirdInFire Agree with you.

[lucsoft]

I would love if these slide over menus are always visible on wide screen monitors

[markets]

I would love if these slide over menus are always visible on wide screen monitors

Yes please 🙏🏼 This will avoid all those new double-click for common actions.

[vladdoster]

This 100x.

[mort666]

Got to be the single worst UI change that GH have implemented and the last one was really bad.. The Slide over everything just doesn't work, I tried it on preview and opted out as it was awful then and got worse. Too many workflow jarring elements, seems to make every tab double even triple memory usage, on Firefox is it is god damn incredible that every page load page elements dart all over the screen, the search takes up the entire page, making it impossible to read any of the page, so god forbid you wanted to search for something that was on the page your on elsewhere on GH, and plus it extends past the bottom it is unusable.

The search defaulting to sticking rubbish in there as suggestions, absolutely workflow breaking, as you have to delete it first so you can search for what you actually want.

Basically they never tested this with anyone that uses a PC to access GH, this is basically a mobile UI on a desktop platform.

[tbroyer]

Crashes the chrome tab ("error code: SIGILL") at the first navigation (from my dashboard to my profile)

[strackoverflow]

👋 Hey there, sorry to hear that this happened. Are you able to share which operating system and Chrome version you're using so I can take a look at this for you? Thanks!

[tbroyer]

This is Chrome 112.0.5615.49 on Linux.

[Wahid7852]

Loved the change, clean menus now

[rdipardo]

Crashes the chrome tab ("error code: SIGILL") at the first navigation (from my dashboard to my profile)

Same experience with Opera on Linux.

Opera Version: 97.0.4719.43
Operating System: Linux 5.10.0-21-amd64
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/111.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 OPR/97.0.0.0 (en-US), ANGLE (AMD, AMD KABINI, OpenGL 4.5)

[colossalchicken]

I use Firefox on Linux and it works just fine - It must be a problem with chromium.

[williamjallen]

I frequently go to my pull requests and issues via the links at the top of the page. Hiding those links in a menu option adds another click. I much prefer the old UI.

[UsamaAmjad]

This is the same reason I turned off this feature

[dionrhys]

I turned this feature off because of this too. Going to Pull Requests to see my own PRs and others' review requests is something I use often.

I only knew about Pull Requests being hidden behind the logo from this thread. Nothing indicated that the GitHub logo is a menu (that I noticed) so I didn't think to click on that to go find Pull Requests.

[JeanMeche]

Yeah, this is sub-perfect, having to manully type https://github.com/pulls.

I wish a direct link would come back !

[ciceco]

Yes, I also think the new interface is not as good as the original one

[mort666]

This 'new' interface is ****** ******* awful. Why the hell does the right mouse click not give me 'back' navigation. But gives me emoji's... WHY!!!!!! It is like every day keep finding more (really want to swear a lot now) broken stupidity in the redesign, it is like the entire platform has turned into a playpen for a child. Not a place for work. It it is frankly amazing how broken search is, like it can't find code in the same repo your in.. absolutely not fit for purpose. Roll back every bit, fire everyone responsible and never do it again..

[Namoshek]

Since most monitors have quite the resolution nowadays, I don't really see a need to hide stuff in hidden menus. And the contrast of the old menu was better.

[alexander-kastil]

It seems that Microsoft and Github cannot purchase proper displays (27“+, 4K) for their employees … Everything has to fit into small screens. They dont care about usability … Same on Windows 11 and the removal of the ungroup taskbar items. Tested the slide over for 15 secs and disabled it at once

[adamcstephens]

Not everybody has large screens or large windows. Please do not design the GitHub UI to towards them.

[moeenio]

Not everybody has large screens or large windows. Please do not design the GitHub UI to towards them.

ever heard of ✨ responsive design ✨ ?

[mort666]

Hmm... Fact is there is this thing, it is called responsive design, it enables people to design UIs to cater for people who have screens of all sizes.... Now this is what irks me completely about these stupid UI 'redesigns'. For some reason you almost always end up with huge blank spaces either size of a narrow strip in the middle of the display, even at 1920x1080 (aka 1080p) targeted screen resolutions (you know probably the most common display resolution..). And by narrow strip I mean on average a strip between 980px and ~1200px wide... So you could be loosing over a 3rd of the available space to nothing.... Why? It actually makes the content harder to read????? It doesn't just affect those with 1440p and 2160p resolution displays, those resolutions just make the experience imposed significantly worse. Because even though this new UIs will use some responsive design CSS features, they never (I've yet to see one site cater to a large resolution display with these UI redesigns) implement responsive layouts above 1080p resolutions.

Now in the case of this site, all it takes is the following CSS to mitigate the crappy implementation by the UI designers here:

.container-xl {
  max-width: 100%;
  margin-right: auto;
  margin-left: auto;
}

.container-lg {
  max-width: 100%;
  margin-right: auto;
  margin-left: auto;
}

@media (min-width: 768px) {
  .feed-content {
    max-width: 100%;
  }
 .feed-content .feed-main {
    max-width: 100%;
  }
}

Using that with Refined-Github has mostly dealt with the width issues.. Then uBlock Origin setup with some heavy filtering to eliminate any crap from the 'UI' like the file viewer crap, most of the right sidebar rubbish and pointless buttons. But so far I've not found a fix for the total not fit for purpose Search that couldn't find a 30 foot long needle on a table with just that needle on it....

[kiliczsh]

When I click my username left top, it adds open class to this element: <detail id="details-3c99c0" ... class="details-reset details-overlay d-inline-block">. It overlaps for x(closing cross) sign.

[justinbyo]

Hey @kiliczsh thanks for the feedback. Could you share a screenshot? cc: @strackoverflow

[kiliczsh]

@justinbyo here it is

[strackoverflow]

Thank you! This appears to be unrelated to the navigation redesign, but I will pass this issue along to the team that maintains that part of the website!

[demkom58]

All these stretched blocks are very inconvenient to use, before everything was nearby, but now you need to drag the cursor through half the window. Also, the menu that appears when clicking on the avatar was more convenient for the same reason. For me, this is a step backwards, and this is one of the reasons why I don't like other platforms design.

[r-thomson]

Hiding the "Pull requests" and "Issues" links behind a popover is introducing unnecessary extra clicks to my workflow. There is plenty of space on the the main navbar— at least on my screen— to keep those links.

[rosszurowski]

Came here after disabling the beta to say the same thing. If you're tagged on lots of PR reviews, it's easy to lose track of them, so I'll regularly go Pull Requests → Review Requests from the top menu. Couldn't keep using the menu redesign where that was missing.

[vladdoster]

This 100x.

[DaanMoura]

The new menu is not intuitive. I tried to click on the GitHub logo to return to the home page, but it opened the menu. Then I see the home button on the navigation bar. And when you scroll down, you have to return to the top to reach the logo that opens the menu. There are too many clicks to do a simple thing.

[vidalvasconcelos]

A link to the projects would be interesting, similar to what we have for Issues and Pull Requests, a fact that hinders the adoption of Github Projects is how far the projects are from home.

[technima]

Yes! This needs to be added. It takes way too many clicks to get to my projects list from Home. I would love for this to be added as an option on the mobile app Home too.

[mustafaozhan]

Please consider all the projects that I am in, not only the projects in profile but also from the organizations that I contribute.

[Dariusch]

My primary purpose of the mobile homepage was to see if I have any notifications. Now they are hidden in the profile menu. For now I switched back to the old one

[agarciacalvo]

I totally agree, but instead of it being similar to Issues and Pull Requests, it would be more useful if it were like Repositories and Teams.

[keller-mark]

Would be very useful to be able to pin a few projects

[mattwelke]

I don't like how a lot of things feel like they're now two clicks away instead of one. Going to the home page stands out to me as the best example right now. Also, I don't like how profiles look. The navigation bar not being right above the photo in the profile, all the way to the left instead, looks weird I think. It feels disjointed, as if it's separating a GitHub user from their work.

[justinbyo]

Hey @mattwelke thanks checking it out and for the feedback. Can you tell us a little more about what you're doing on the homepage that makes it the best place to launch your workflow?

[mattwelke]

So it might be more that it just feels weird to me right now and less that it actually impacts my workflows. I like to do a sort of "reset" when I'm working where I go to the home page to start whatever task I want to do next, even if I could technically start that task from where I was without first going to the home page. Things that come to mind include:

• Viewing my notifications (if I see the blue dot saying I have some to read)
• Seeing the latest updates from profiles I follow
• Visiting my profile settings

[namzo]

@mattwelke This is really helpful. Thanks for sharing!

[vladdoster]

This 100x.

[phildenhoff]

I disabled the preview as soon as I tried it. To reiterate what others have already said:

• I use the GitHub logo to go home. That it now opens a menu is weird.
• Having to click twice to open PRs and Issues is annoying

I do like the simple Plus button to create new things, but it's confusing that it opens a menu while the inbox opens my notifications page. Also... I wasn't sure the latter was notifications until I clicked it. Icons should have labels.

Honestly if anything I'd rather have a toggle-able sidebar a-la Arc. I can open it very easily when I need it and hide it most of the time.

[justinbyo]

Hey @phildenhoff thanks for checking it out and for the feedback. This is really helpful and I'll take this back to the team.

[etienne-napoleone]

not necessarily agree on needing labels, but the difference in behaviour between the + and inbox is weird.
Ideally, having a popout menu to take a quick glance at the latest notifications would make it great imo

[EduApps-CDG]

I was going to complain about twice click, they should show the menu in the "on mouse over" event instead of "on click".

Ironically, you have to click twice to get to the main page lol.

[mattwelke]

Making a new post because it feels like its distinct from the layout related post I did a few minutes ago. The menu that opens when you click your profile photo feels slower, laggier, etc than the existing drop down menu. I noticed me moving my mouse lower to select an item from the menu and not seeing the choices in the menu highlighted as soon as my mouse went over them. This wasn't reproduce able very easily, but felt weird when it happened.

The new menu looks more complex than the existing drop down menu. One of the things I've always liked about GitHub's design was how for the most part, it felt like just plain old HTML, with some more advanced features sprinkled on. It didn't feel bloated. This new one feels more bloated.

[justinbyo]

Got it. Thanks!

[rudiedirkx]

Everything is only white, dark white and light white =( It's very typically modern, but not very readable IMO. Use more colors and accents and borders. Not just #fff - #eee.

[mattwelke]

Yeah I didn't like the huge contrast between the top bar and the rest of the page. I was using one of the dark themes. I haven't tried light theme yet. But with my large, high power monitor, usually light themes result in my screen being too bright (I work indoors), even with my screen brightness turned down a lot.

[Siedlerchr]

In the light theme the header bar is not really distinguishable from the rest

[azatoth]

@justinbyo May I assume you are not listening on your users at all? Seems you are just ignoring any feedback and just steamrolling ahead...

Please just restore the old UI.

[narspt]

+1 unhappy, please allow to disable this new crap navigation...

[Vallek]

How do you make a site menu with refetching items on every page? Why is it so tall?

Please stop. It's like with Firefox. They break ui and features every other update. No one asks for this. Stop doing this. Listen to your users!

[cweijan]

The new UI is terrible😥, it's only suitable for mobile, please go back to the old UI

[borrow-checker]

This isn't a social media site, the most important linkages are now hidden behind an additional 2 clicks. I don't care about my "social feed" or "how pretty and minimalist the landing page looks" - this is a business website that half the planet uses to function at their jobs - I'd rather see the things I care about in the hierarchy. Who on earth designed this? The people who ruined Azure portal?

[Vallek]

I made a quick compact style for Github Header. It just makes vertical paddings smaller + adds borders to tabs. It's for Stylus.

Maybe will make buttons smaller in future but it's not so simple)
upd: and done) also centered tabs

[eshack94]

@Vallek This is perfect, thank you.

[AnthonyGrondin]

I have provided a very valid and constructive user feedback when asked so, about the new global navigation UI, which, I don't even know why they asked, because apparently they addressed NONE of it.

I disabled this new horrible feature nobody wants or asked (If you guys want to find a reason to justify your job at Github, the minimum you could do is listen to your user), like many other users who disabled it. Considering Github is now owned by Microsoft, we can assume they log and track everything with their invasive telemetry practices, so they've seen how many of us disabled it.

I don't care about new features, I don't care that the old UI won't get the new features, as I don't even want them anyway, so that would be two birds one stone.

[azatoth]

How do you disable it?

[BitesizedLion]

No longer can, you used to be able to.

[justinbyo]

Hey everyone, thanks for all the feedback you provided. Now that the global navigation is generally available, we are closing this discussion.

We got a ton of input from this discussion, as well as the survey we linked to in the navigation itself once we opened the beta up to millions and millions of users by default. For those curious, the final opt-out rate was less than 1%. That number was a direct result of the feedback received in this channel. As you may remember, some of these changes were the addition of a new button to trigger the menu, returning the GitHub logo link target to the home dashboard, and adding buttons to take users to their global lists of issues and pull requests – not to mention a ton of invaluable bug reports and accessibility improvements you all identified. Of course, we unfortunately weren't able to address all the feedback due to scope and timing, but we've added a number of improvements to our roadmap.

To wrap up, the big goals of this project were to make the navigation more accessible (a11y) to users of all abilities and assistive technologies (think screen readers), consistent across every page of the product, and responsive to every device size, in addition to some usability improvements like breadcrumbs and improvements to the IA of the menus. We've met those goals and we really appreciate your help getting us get there. Thanks!

[coder0107git]

Guess we're gonna need some userscripts to fix this mess. ☹

Where I live there is a popular website that got a similar "improment" earlier this year that looks worse (but is more usable) than this update. People who used it infrequently and those who couldn't care less about UI were mostly just suprised that there was a big update. Everyone else was very disgruntled and upset that everything became more complicated to access and ruined their muscle memory. People don't rely on that site for their jobs, people's jobs do rely on Github.

It's sad that it seems that designer are increasingly trying to make sites on desktops look like they were made for tablets. Mobile design is great on phones, desktop design on a desktop, and a mix on tablet's. When people try to make one platform look and act like another, at best looks slightly out of place, and at worst is unusable. One example of that idea done well is the Google Play website (site, not app). On desktop it has a top navbar and on mobile it has a bottom app bar. While in years past the site looked horrendous, now it looks pretty nice thanks to improvements like that.

I'm all for usability and a11y improvments but, when it becomes harder to use for users without any a11y needs, it seems logical that it also should create a worse expirence for users who do depend on a11y.

[aradalvand]

Embarrassing. Just embarrassing.

[Vallek]

Ah yes improving accessibility by removing text, hiding everything behind more clicks, and everfetching menu items. Stop using disabled people as a shield for bad design. One have nothing to do with another. No one buying your virtue signaling here.

Also you know damn well percentage of opt out is always 1%. That's the people you should listen to.

[JunkiEDM]

The top comments here gave an obvious signal that the changes in this update made the user experience notably worse, and explained why and what could be done to remedy it, few of which was apparently taken into account. While some improvements to the initial design were made, a lot of the complaints had to do with the fundamental layout changes. It shouldn't come as a surprise to a developer-driven platform that developers value efficiency over most, which this update reduces in several ways. With how mobile-centric the update appears to be on desktop, I was surprised to find out that the mobile experience in the new update is even worse than the desktop one! Much more cluttered, unnecessary whitespace, lack of division/contrast between different sections and buttons, and as many others have pointed out, more clicks/taps for the same result.

Mobile layout comparison:

Some questions/frustrations:
Why are the organization/repo buttons now a needless 2-item dropdown menu on mobile? Why do the watch/sponsor/fork/star buttons reduce to icons when there is obvious room for the accompanying text? If the "big goals of this update are improved a11y", then why is the contrast lower in a lot of places than pre-update on mobile? Why was the "organization / repo" information moved to the navbar if you have to repeat the repo name again just a line below? Why did you move all of the navigation buttons from the navbar to a flyout panel when that's left a useless black void of space in the middle of the navbar? Wouldn't the fact that there can now be two differing PR/issue buttons on the same page - one for your own, and one for the repo's - be possibly confusing to those using screen-readers? I find my eyes have to move around a lot more than before to absorb the core information of a repo. Was this not the case in internal testing?

Please don't do a months-long public beta and ask for feedback if you're just going to ignore most of the core concerns and push out the update anyway. I understand that getting these things right takes time, but I think the better approach would have been making incremental improvements to the existing layout users have gotten used to, rather than "re-inventing the wheel" by moving everything around and into menus. Visual consistency doesn't always lend itself to better usability.

[jsoref]

@justinbyo you should probably unpin this discussion.

[narspt]

why not just keep it optional as it was? why force!? and for sure most of the 99% should be casual users that visit the site to get some software and go away, for sure these don't care changing it... it would be interesting to know the % of active users that disabled the new gui!

[dmitry-stepanenko]

Is there a way to disable this new UI? Maybe there're any solutions from the community? I hate having to click 2 times to get most useful functionalities along with having tiny icons instead of text. What a terrible update

[blakegearin]

Hi folks. I've made a userscript called GitHub Custom Global Navigation that brings back the Old School look and feel. It also has a Happy Medium configuration or you can create your own! I hope it serves you well.

I'll be reading through this discussion again to see if I can add support for more features on Happy Medium or otherwise. Also, it's plain JS with one dependency and is stable, so feel free to contribute.

Finding sources for the Old School style is more challenging than I expected. If you happen to have videos or HTML/CSS (signed in) of GitHub from early 2023, please contribute to this thread.

[eshack94]

@blakegearin You sir, are a legend. I was working on something like this (half-baked, not totally functional) when I found this comment. Thank you!

[neekless]

Takes way more clicks to navigate on mobile. Disappointed that it cannot be disabled anymore.

[frobnitzem]

Guys, there is another way around this problem. They're testing it out at gitlab.com and have already migrated several projects to the new backend.

…

On Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:06 PM Stephen Kapp ***@***.***> wrote: Hmm... Fact is there is this thing, it is called responsive design, it enables people to design UIs to cater for people who have screens of all sizes.... Now this is what irks me completely about these stupid UI 'redesigns'. For some reason you almost always end up with huge blank spaces either size of a narrow strip in the middle of the display, even at 1920x1080 (aka 1080p) targeted screen resolutions (you know probably the most common display resolution..). And by narrow strip I mean on average a strip between 980px and ~1200px wide... So you could be loosing over a 3rd of the available space to nothing.... Why? It actually makes the content harder to read????? It doesn't just affect those with 1440p and 2160p resolution displays, those resolutions just make the experience imposed significantly worse. Because even though this new UIs will use some responsive design CSS features, they never (I've yet to see one site cater to a large resolution display with these UI redesigns) implement responsive layouts above 1080p resolutions. Now in the case of this site, all it takes is the following CSS to mitigate the crappy implementation by the UI designers here: .container-xl { max-width: 100%; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; } .container-lg { max-width: 100%; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; } @media (min-width: 768px) { .feed-content { max-width: 100%; } .feed-content .feed-main { max-width: 100%; } } Using that with Refined-Github has mostly dealt with the width issues.. Then uBlock Origin setup with some heavy filtering to eliminate any crap from the 'UI' like the file viewer crap, most of the right sidebar rubbish and pointless buttons. But so far I've not found a fix for the total not fit for purpose Search that couldn't find a 30 foot long needle on a table with just that needle on it.... — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#52083 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AARDW5ZLIKCGIALHT7KKONLYFEWNXAVCNFSM6AAAAAAWUI5JPOVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43SRDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHM3TMMBYGUZDO> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[armandino]

The new UI doesn't work well on mobile. Using the new menu is very inconvenient, e.g. i can't access the Pull Requests tab because the top is not accessible

In general, Github has made several bad decisions in the past few months (e.g. the new code search). Really hope you'd leave things as they are instead of making them worse.