How to improve navigation through the reports

[mirifax]

Summing up the issue, even though it has been talked about it a lot i think the best solution is not there yet:

When 50+ samples are in the drop-down menu if the navbar -> not nice.

Therefore there are 3 proposed options so far to improve this:

• Make the line stating the sample Name in the reports interactive. @rekado maybe you can clarify what interactive means. Because a dropdown menu would be the same problem again?
• add two links in each report so that the user can go straight to QC-report/variant report but for the SAME sample.
• @al2na proposed a tab in the navbar "sample-specific reports", which would be like the table on the bottom of the landing page.

[rekado]

Could you please rephrase this issue? It is not clear what the problem is.

[rekado]

Since this is redundant with the dropdowns in the navbar and the overview page somehow I think we should not implement it all.

The navbar is not a great place for these dropdowns. I still think we should remove it, or at least remove the dropdowns from there.

[al2na]

Navbar should be removed I think or at least dropdowns, I agree

So task is remove dropdowns from navbar, and make sure you can travel back to the landing page when you click on the navbar

[vicfabienne]

tbh I'm very confused about this discussion about removing the navbar at all. How do you navigate quickly through the reports otherwise? Eg when you want to check out particular samples - or comparing two samples with each other on a quick-per-eye way?

I also don't really understand why you consider this navigation arrow idea as redundant.
I think of it as different navigation tools, serving different purposes. Having the goal in mind to need a few "empty-clicks" (clicks that don't get me right away to the page I want) as possible - ideally not having the need to do empty-clicks at all.

But maybe it would be also very helpful to get feedback on those things from other people who actually work with those reports in order to get the info out of them they need.

[rekado]

We already discussed this multiple times. Here's what we agreed on:

• the dropdowns in the navbar grow as there are more samples
• the pipeline should be run with an ever-growing number of samples
• hence the dropdowns will grow beyond what is usable

Usability research suggests that there should be no more than 7 items in a menu bar. We're below that number, but the dropdowns exceed this.

This is unrelated to individual feelings about usability. It simply doesn't scale as it is. So we want an alternative. And that alternative ought to scale.

Keeping the navbar and the growing list of non-interactive dropdowns is not an option.

[rekado]

Nobody suggests removing all means of navigation; obviously we still want to be able to visit individual reports easily.

Alternatives have already been suggested, such as this: make the line that mentions the sample name interactive, so that a different sample can be selected from the report page.

This would allow us to trivially get to reports of the same type for different samples. The other axis on which we want to move is report type while keeping the sample identical. Simple solution: link to the other reports for this sample.

[al2na]

I think the main issue is the dropdown from the navigation. What happens we you have 50 samples? Or you want to go to a certain date and that is not included in the sample name. The best way to navigate sample-specific reports is the table we already have.

I suggest one link on the navigation bar that says "sample-specific reports" and points to "Detailed per-sample reports" section or a separate page that contains that table and explanations.

[vicfabienne]

what about just using scrollable dropdowns?
and at some later point search menus? (but maybe we can combine that with some DT approach)
and the thing that Miriam describes here and the axis ricardo mentions and we already discussed at some point.