Revert Change to Navigation Tree

[mdpenguin]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

PR #35559 added a collapsible navigation tree. This makes it harder to find features since they are hidden behind collapsed categories by default. The user has to guess which category a feature will be in and click around until they find it. Please either revert this or make it a feature that can be turned off. Consider adding a search bar instead for quickly finding features.

Scenario when this would be used?

When changing settings

Supporting information

No response

[crutkas]

Thanks for the feedback, we'll be breaking stuff out more and with ZoomIt coming in, stuff becomes unsustainable in a giant list. We were pretty open on social along with #23744 and pinned the issue too vetting for feedback.

Happy to keep this open but right now the plan is to continue to iterate with adding in search and adding in the right side breakouts which is tracked via #35621

[mdpenguin]

Hiding options and adding more and more clicks to get to something is not user friendly design. Consider moving to a grid interface that takes up the bulk of the window. Clicking on the desired applet opens the options for it. Have a back button to get back to the main grid. It is much more scalable than having all of the applets crowded on the side.

[mdpenguin]

Also, having an option to hide inactive applets or to move them to the bottom of the list would also help to make it manageable.

[ethanfangg]

@mdpenguin, the "dashboard" page functions very similarly to what you're suggesting, im curious, if it doesn't solve your issue here, what is it missing?

[mdpenguin]

Because you said that, I tested clicking on the box of one of the applets in the dashboard and it went to the options for that applet. It's not, however, clear that it does that since there's nothing to indicate that users should click on the boxes and I had no idea until you suggested it that it would work. Further, the very existence of the navigation tree suggests to me that this isn't the intended use of the dashboard, so I would never have thought to click on the applet boxes to access the options for them.

Can you tell me why you think that both are necessary? What benefit does the navigation tree offer that isn't satisfied by the dashboard? Is the benefit of having two ways to navigate to the applets worth taking up the additional space in the window? It seems like a step back towards the pre-Fluent UI days to hide the applets behind a collapsed menu tree and it diverges from all other MS applications that I have installed on my computer right now.

[ethanfangg]

I think we'd like to revamp the dashboard at some point, but in short, the user goals that the dashboard currently aims to solve:

• Quickly see (and optionally change) the enable/disable state of my utilities
• Quickly remember the corresponding shortcut for a given utility
• Quickly launch a utility (esp. in the case of utilities like Environment Variables, FancyZones layout editor, etc.)
• Quickly navigate to settings by clicking on the card

The changes to the left-hand navigation were primarily driven by the fact we have some 30-odd utilities (and plan to continue to keep adding more!) and many fall "below the fold" of the window bounds (needing to scroll to find them). This poses a discoverability problem for users acclimating to PowerToys and trying to understand what kinds of utilities we provide, as well as existing users discovering new (or even old) utilities! Essentially, a trade off between needing to scroll to get a utility in view and then clicking, or clicking on the group and then clicking on the utility and we prefer the later because it also produces some nice discoverability and understandability benefits!

If there are key utilities that you want to be able to access more quickly, I wouldn't be opposed to making a "Favorites section". Maybe something like this (just a mock in Figma I drew up):

We also want to add in badging and tagging (see https://x.com/ClintRutkas/status/1847359630818890202) where you can imagine we'd call out new utilities (or changes). Search is also something we'd like to add eventually.

[ethanfangg]

Or perhaps a setting to "expand all" by default would be your preference?

[mdpenguin]

The ability to expand all would make this less of an anti-feature since it would no longer be hiding applets. Rather than favorites, I'd suggest splitting it into active and inactive, as mentioned in an earlier comment. A search bar would be better.

That said, you still didn't answer why you want to maintain two different menus for managing the applets. You say that the navigation tree is too cluttered, so why not get rid of it? What does it provide that the dashboard does not? The dashboard gives you more room and flexibility to display and access the applets and resolves the issue that hiding the applets behind collapsed categories was intended to solve in the first place. Plus it gets out of the way when actually working with the applet settings.