One feature we're releasing for this sprint is a quick access menu on every page for the common day-to-day actions used in Coupa. Previously, a user would either have to bookmark the common urls they used, or dig through the cluttered Administration page to find what they wanted. For our app, we needed something more expressive than a simple web navigation because there are simply too many actions for a user to take.
Before I bore you with all the reasoning and technical mumbo-jumbo, this is what the final menu looks like. All the sexiness is provided by the mad skills of Kyle and David.
Our application deals with several different document types. There are some common workflows that these documents follow. The most basic workflow is for a user to create a Requisition, have that requisition go through an approval process, create a Purchase Order (PO, in procurement-speak) from that requisition, and manage Invoices, and Inventory based on POs. We took a very Apple approach to organizing the top-level tabs so that users can think of what document they want to work with, and then drill down to see what actions are available on that document type. Initially, we had action-oriented tabs, but it was hard and confusing to figure out how to logically group the submenu items.
Based on who's logged in, there are different tabs, and different submenus. If a normal user logs in, all they can see is the Home tab because all they care about is ordering stuff. Admins and various supervisor roles will see different sets of tabs. To make this possible, we use a great little Rails plugin called Blueprint to define the structure of the menu in Ruby code. It lets us define a hierarchial menu structure with ruby blocks. Very spiffy.
class GlobalMenuStructure < Blueprint::Container
define do
node 'menus' do
menu 'Home' do
node 'links' do
link 'Home', :link_to => { :controller => 'user', :action => 'home' }
# ...
end
end
menu 'Requests' do
node 'links' do
link 'Requisitions', :link_to => { :controller => 'requisitions', :action => 'index' }
# ...
end
end
#...
end
end
Defining the structure in code enables us to generate and tailor a menu for each specific user. The hierarchial menu structure also lets us create a reverse-lookup object to determine which tab should be highlighted based on the current page's url.
After the menu structure is defined, we looped over the structure and conditionally spewed out a bunch of unstyled ul's for the menu. We chose YUI Menu to give us cross-browser hover effects and actions on the menus. YUI lets you define a menu either in HTML markup or in javascript. Theoretically we would get slightly faster performance if we created the menu's in javascript, but it was easier to do styling and extra features if we defined it in markup. Note that doing it in markup leaves users without javascript with an equally unusable app because the unhidden and unstyled submenus would cover everything else. YUI also allows you to trap for keypresses so you could implement keyboard shortcuts if you wanted.
I don't recommend these super deep and complex menus for webapps, because it ends up making the webapp feel more like a desktop app. At the same time, web menus are never as good as native desktop menus, so it ends up looking half-assed. The Coupa menus are definitely the best solution for the problem though. If we didn't have menus, we'd still be control-f'ing for that link we wanted.