New navigation and other changes on Habré

Hello! Announcing the launch of "Toaster", we mentioned the imminent redesign of "Habr", which has not changed since the end of the last decade. In recent weeks, we have been actively testing the updated site and today, finally, we are pleased to present the changes to the entire audience.

As you know, Habr has several satellite sites that revolve around it - Brainstorage , Freelansim and Toster . On these projects, we often “run through” interface solutions, which, in case of successful practice, are later used on a “city-forming project”.



One of these innovations was the vertical navigation menu, which first appeared on the “Toaster”, and later on the “Freelance”. When we first tried such a solution, there were a lot of feedback, saying "uncomfortable", "I will not go to the site", "immediately redo everything." But after a while, on the contrary, more and more positive feedback began to arrive, we saw that the audience got used to it - six months after the launch, the audience of “Toaster”, where we applied this solution, now amounts to 1.4 million unique users per month, and the project itself is quite is booming. So this is nothing more than a matter of habit formation - you cannot make any change “invisible” so that absolutely everyone is satisfied.



The main goal of changes in navigation is to increase the useful area of ​​the user's first screen. The old navigation menu took up a lot of space, because of this often had to scroll down the page to start reading. Now the usable area starts immediately from the upper border of the browser window, which is undoubtedly very convenient.



The new navigation allows you to quickly travel around the site - the main navigation elements of the menu are always before the eyes of the user. The old navigation was not the most convenient - to move between sections, you had to rewind the page to the top, and sometimes even make several transitions. Now you can get to any section of the site in a few clicks - from any Habr page.

Another change on the site - we abandoned such an entity as "Events". This section occupied a separate place in the menu, but at the same time was not very popular among our users, so at the moment we decided to completely abandon it. Considering that Q&A migrated to the Toaster a couple of months ago , now only posts remained on Habré.

What else? If you wrote publications on the Habré, then in your profile you can notice a new block “Contribution to the hubs”, which demonstrates the user's involvement in certain hubs and shows what contribution he made to them. Looking at this block, you can quickly imagine what a specific user is doing or is fond of. Guess these users?



A similar block (“Hub Leaders”) is in each hub - it lists 10 authors who have made the largest contribution to this hub.

This is not the end of the site redesign. We will gradually continue to update the resource both stylistically and ideologically - in the near future we will release the mobile version and several interesting features. The version of the mobile application for the iPad is also on the way.