Thanks to owl of you who took the plunge to test the new left navigation we announced in 🧭 New navigation coming: sign up for early access to give us feedback.
Thanks to your feedback, we've released that update to all KnowledgeOwl accounts!
Why the change?
We know our navigation hasn't always been the easiest for new users to figure out. Our hope with this new navigation is to give you faster access to the things you use most and more logical grouping of features. We're also trying to keep the navigation a bit less noisy, only expanding some of the menus once you hover over them or have opened a page within them.
To that end, we've removed the Library menu completely and promoted most of its contents to the top-level, split the Settings > Basic page into multiple discrete pages, created a Security and access menu for all security-related features and settings, and moved a lot of the style and other customizations into a new Customize menu.
All the changes
Here's a more detailed list of the changes:
- Library is no more: We've moved most of the items in library into their own top-level navigation options (except Synonyms, which is grouped with Search in KB settings).
- New Customize menu: This houses elements of your knowledge base you might want to customize. If it impacts the look, feel, or text of your knowledge base, it lives here. We moved all of these elements from other places:
- Settings > Style is now Customize > Style (HTML & CSS).
- Top-level Contact Form is now Customize > Contact Form.
- Top-level Homepage is now Customize > Homepage.
- Tools > Customize Text is now Customize > Default text.
- Settings > PDF is now Customize > PDF.
- Tools now includes Imports and Exports.
- Settings is now KB settings. It contains most of the same things with one notable change:
- Instead of the single giant Basic Settings page, there are separate discrete pages for things like Basic, Domain, and Article Editor. These are the same settings we've always had, just broken into smaller, more descriptive individual pages.
- New Security and access menu: We moved Settings > Security and Settings > SSO here and also included Readers, Authors, and Spam protection. We received a lot of feedback that tucking all the Account information into your personal profile in the upper right wasn't intuitive.
- Account menus: We revived the Account menu in the upper right and tacked it on to the bottom of the left navigation for good measure. It contains only the options that are account-wide (none of your personal profile stuff).
- Your profile: Your profile now only contains things specific to your user account, like changing your password or your other settings. No more Authors or Readers here!
- As a bonus, you now have a Personal settings page where you can turn on Fun with Linus or opt in to be an early tester of new features.
- More space and a colored icon for the knowledge base name at the top (you can customize this color in KB settings > Basic).
We know this is a lot of change at once, but we believe these changes will ultimately make KnowledgeOwl a more intuitive, easier-to-use, and easier-to-learn interface.
If you have feedback on any of the new navigation options, please contact us and let us know! Our early testers offered some fantastic feedback to help us improve this navigation, and we're continuing to find ways to improve your experience.
And please extend Kate some grace as she furiously tries to get all of our documentation fully updated. Many of these options were in flux right up until the release so she couldn't prep them in advance.
