At inSided, we’re always looking for opportunities to improve the UX of our product. Alongside bigger projects, we’re looking at making some design changes to improve the look and feel of Control.

Our main goals with this design update:

1. Maximise the space available in Control to help you focus on your work
2. Make the interface of Control match the inSided brand more closely
   (we’re sure you can all empathise with this one, given how important we all know it is to make your community match your company branding).
3. Make Control a more beautiful place to spend time in

Some highlights to watch out for in the designs:

• An optionally collapsible secondary menu, to give you more room to focus on your current task.
• Icons are shown in menu by default. It’s also easy to learn for beginners - simply by hovering on it, the name of the menu item will be shown in a tooltip. 
• The header bar in Control is gone - everything has moved into the menu.
• A new button to quickly take you to the homepage of your community.

Restructure of menu items

• Given the new design, we also want to do a restructure that fits with the new design.
• Here are some changes to watch out for:
  • Configuration will change to ‘Customization’ - we want to aggregate more things around customizing the platform in one place: e.g. the new customization mode we launched for the homepage, styling settings from the current ‘Appearance’ section, Phrases, Third-party scripts, Custom CSS - anything that lets you make the community your own!
  • Embeddable widgets will move under integrations (we consider it to be an integration, it’s just one that you don’t have to build yourselves!:))
  • Gamification will move out the ‘Users’ section to get its own space, so it’s easier to find/adjust.
  • Some options under Users will move to ‘Settings’ (managing user roles, custom profile fields) - we want to keep the users menu item simple.

If you have any suggestions or questions please drop us a reply below!