The Vonage problem
Vonage's dashboard nav grew organically as they expanded from one product to many — ending up with a "long product-based list" where users couldn't find what they needed.1 This is exactly our situation: the monitor sidebar grew from a few bots to bots + terminals + 5 pages + external links, with Library accumulating 6 unrelated sub-tabs.
Vonage restructured their nav into 4 task-based groups (Quick Links, Build & Manage, Troubleshoot & Learn, More) and validated it with tree testing. Result: 19% increase in navigation success rate.1
The key insight: they stopped grouping by product (entity) and started grouping by what the user is trying to do (intent). Our proposed restructure follows the same approach.
What's wrong now
There's no "is everything OK?" page. Users should be able to "grasp the available breadth of information first, then focus on the area of interest."2 Currently you land on a bot detail and have to click around to assess colony health.
Knowledge, Ideas, Requests, Recall, Schedule, Inbox — six unrelated things behind one label. This is product-based grouping ("it's all library stuff") rather than task-based ("what am I trying to do?"). The Vonage case showed this pattern directly hurts findability.1
Bot restart is the 5th item in "Pages." GoodData's hierarchy principle: "align visual and logical hierarchies."2 Actions on a bot belong where you're viewing the bot, not in a separate page.
Colony > Tools and System > Tools show the same data. When content appears in multiple places, users can't build a reliable mental model of where things live. NN/Group's information foraging theory (Pirolli & Card, 1999): duplicate entries split the "information scent" and reduce confidence in navigation paths.4
Servers, Infrastructure, and Tools are three different concerns under one ambiguous label. Clearer labeling directly improves navigation success rates.1
Current vs proposed
What moves where
What we know vs what we're guessing
High confidence: Task-based nav outperforms product-based nav. The Vonage case study measured this directly — 19% improvement — and our monitor has the same structural problem.1
High confidence: An Overview page will reduce time-to-insight. The 40-30-20-10 space rule gives us a concrete layout framework.3 Progressive disclosure (overview → detail) is well-established UX pattern.2
Medium confidence: The specific groupings (Queue vs Knowledge) are reasonable but untested. Ideally we'd validate with card sorting, but the user base is small (Max + bots). We can iterate quickly if the groupings feel wrong.
Retracted: The "40% engagement drop beyond 12 items" stat cited in v1 traces to DesignRush but not to a verifiable primary source. We've removed it. The directional claim (simpler nav outperforms complex nav) still holds per NN/Group's tree testing research, but we can't put a specific number on it.