Only show context relevant links (Personal or Administration settings) in sidebar

[privatemaker]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As an admin of a Nextcloud instance, I am always slightly disoriented when accessing Personal Settings and especially so when accessing Administration Settings section. The main issues are:

1. The top 50% of my sidebar (where my eye lands first) is Personal Settings links- which have nothing to do with administration of the instance.

2. There are two sidebar menu items called Sharing which is slightly confusing.

3. The current approach limits how many relevant menu items are able to be displayed on the sidebar as number of apps scales. This increases cognitive load.

Describe the solution you'd like

Split up the two types of settings semantically by having sidebar links which only pertain to that area.

The Administration settings should look like this:

The Personal settings would be absent of Administration links below.

Additional context

Allowing Administration settings to have it's down dedicated sidebar works nicely with #40160 in terms of information architecture and displaying relevant information to the user.

[privatemaker]

oops, forgot cc: @nextcloud/designers

[marcoambrosini]

I think this would be a big improvement!

[jancborchardt]

I think this is a very good idea and can reduce confusion – especially now that we separated the account menu entries too.

Just cc'ing @AndyScherzinger @karlitschek for info since it is a small but fundamental change.

[szaimen]

I agree that this would be a great usability improvement!

[privatemaker]

I realized while working on this that when a user is not an admin the menu item says Settings instead of Personal settings

I find this mutating word to be not ideal- it slightly violates rules 4. and 6. of the 10 Usability Heuristics by Nielsen Norman Group.

I propose dropping Personal such that it always reads:

• Settings
• Administration Settings (when an admin)

What say you @jancborchardt @nimishavijay @marcoambrosini @szaimen ?

[szaimen]

What about Account settings as alternative to Personal settings?

I dont think dropping Personal without replacement is the way to go here...

[privatemaker]

Using the word Account is a decent idea, but Account Settings feels redundant in English. My UI/X design approach is to reduce cognitive load as much as possible, always.

To clarify, my suggestion to remove Personal is not untested territory, it is merely bringing continuity across admin and non-admin users, the later already see only the word Settings Consider the following hypothetical 'support' chat between an Admin and non-admin User

Admin: "Click on the menu with your picture in top right."
User: "Ok. I see a menu, do I go to Settings?"
Admin: "No, click on 'Personal settings'."
User: "I don't see a 'Personal settings' I see Settings."
Admin: "Mmm, I guess try just Settings then?!"
...

It is common to use just the word Settings consider Github

[jancborchardt]

@privatemaker as for wording, we could just use "Settings" (for the previous "Personal settings") and "Administration" (for "Admin settings")?