Content: Navigation microcopy questions

[emileighoutlaw]

Some content things:

1. Since clicking on Campaign Finance Data takes users to the data home —should Registration and Reporting take users to the Registration and Reporting home (and thus no need for an additional Registration and reporting home tab?
2. Amy/Amy and I decided we're going sentence case on headlines and subheads. We should lowercase "options" in Registration Options. I haven't decided what that means for the main homepage buttons—would it look weird to have Registration and reporting and Campaign finance data in the top bar?
3. Should we add the essentials checklist as a dropdown? If we have a reason not to, I will happily go along! Just wondering if we've thought about it.

Tasks to completion:
[] Decide about Registration and reporting drop-down links
[] Decide about menu capitalization scheme

[emileighoutlaw]

[emileighoutlaw]

Particularly interested in your thoughts on this one ^^ @noahmanger @jenniferthibault @onezerojeremy

[jenniferthibault]

1. Yes, I'd think that "Registration and reporting" should be the link to that landing page since the other does, thus we'd remove that element from the dropdown, but keen for @noahmanger 's sense of interaction on that
2. One way to find out if it looks weird: whaddya think?
   
3. Makes sense to me to add the Essentials in as a nav item, but given discussion here, https://github.com/18F/openFEC/issues/1169#issuecomment-136903864 should it just be "Registration essentials" (or whatever you'd like @emileighoutlaw ) if we're nix-ing the checklist-y-feel?
   All of those things worked in would look like this:
   

[jenniferthibault]

Nevermind to the third point about checklist-y-ness. it appears from that thread that it may be staying now. Anyways, the bigger point is that it would be consistent :)

[onezerojeremy]

Potentially Controversial question: What if we didn't have a drop down for Registration and reporting at all?

Feel free to shoo me. Basically I have the sense that there's something to be gained by having folks go through the registration home page. But it's just a ixd gut feeling, not based on things that came outta research or anything.

(note: this doesn't talk about the future of that nav list)

[emileighoutlaw]

Interesting! I actually don't think it looks weird with the non-caps. What do y'all think?

I am very interested in Jeremy's suggestion! The more I think about it, the more awesome I think it is. It requires more of the readers, but we did talk about wanting to make it harder for users to accidentally register.

[jenniferthibault]

All for it. Can we find a way to do this with the election data section too? (half joking....but can we?)

THE DROPDOWN IS DEAD TO ME.

[noahmanger]

Haha. I can be pursuaded to kill the data dropdown IF we have good section-wide navigation. (Kind of like we were talking about the other day as a replacement for the "breadcrumb" bar).

[noahmanger]

So I removed the dropdown on the "Registration & reporting" part, but think we need it (for now at least) on the "Campaign finance data".

I also relabled "Search for candidates" to "Campaign finance data home" (which is where it used to go), but only show it on mobile.

The reason is that on mobile, tapping the first one simply opens the menu, and isn't a link to the page itself.

Work for everyone?

[jenniferthibault]

Works for me!

Could we take off the "»"'s here? @emileighoutlaw I'm also wondering if we could remove the word "Browse" since it gets repetitive, and will likely be easier to scan with just the category word.

[emileighoutlaw]

Oh yeah! Excellent thought @jenniferthibault. Makes sense to me!

[onezerojeremy]

I think dropping the "»"'s is a great idea!

I think we could remove the "browse" from each, especially if we can figure out a way to cue them to the fact that that is what they are doing. So maybe something like, one "Browse:" that's not clickable, with the different browse options below, clearly children of it. Reason: I think that having at least one nod to the fact that they these are "browse" tables in the navigation helps build people's understanding of our terminology.

Also: what if we include the data tables icon? It really helped some user testing subjects figure out what we meant.

[noahmanger]

Oh yeah! All sounds great. Do you think we should do the icons next to each item? Or just next to the main "Browse" label? Do we also want the "location" icon next to the "Search elections by location"?