Experimental UI navigation

[braunjj]

We’re testing some changes to the top nav bar in the app UI to make it easier to explore and navigate the UI. This experiment applies to both Dagster Core and Dagster+ and you can enable it from your user settings in the upcoming release (1.7.3).

What are we aiming to solve:

The left sidebar doesn't scale well:

• Some organizations have hundreds (or thousands) of asset groups and job and we want to provide better ways to organize these definitions. We recently introduced Owners and Tags for assets and have plans to add tags to other definition types as well but we are running out of space in the sidebar to add these new organization and filtering tools.

Too many sidebars:

• We've added sidebars to many other views in the product recently which often feel odd alongside the app-wide sidebar. Some views of the app have two or three sidebars which isn't great.

"Overview" and "Deployment" is overloaded:

• The existing Overview tab is a grab bag of status pages and definition indexes. We've heard feedback that users sometimes feel like they need to go hunting around the UI to find certain pages (especially new users). Pages like Schedules, Sensors or Backfills don't feel natural under "Overview".
• Similarly, we've heard feedback that, in Dagster+, users have to go hunting for pages Alerts, Env Vars, and Agents (they currently live under the Deployment tab)

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Changes we're exploring

• Removing the sidebar and giving the Assets and Jobs top level index pages – this gives us more room to introduce improved grouping and filtering tools (like we recently did for assets)
• Creating a new Automation tab where Sensors, Schedules, and Backfills will live
• Renaming "Deployment" to "Settings" which we think more accurately describes the pages that live there.

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In Dagster Core

In Dagster+

This is the first navigation experiment we are running. There are still some oddities that I'd like to clean up and you can expect us to iterate on this a few times over the coming months. For example, the "Resources" page still feels randomly placed under "Overview".

We'd appreciate any feedback or input you have. You can share it right here. Our ultimate goal is to make the UI easier to navigate and explore (especially for new users).

[nils-borrmann-tacto]

Thanks for improving this, definitely a step in the right direction!

One thing that still feels odd to me: When I'm on the "Jobs" page and then I click on one job, suddenly I'm in the "Settings" part of Dagster. That just doesn't seem right in a way.

[braunjj]

Thanks @nils-borrmann-tacto. Appreciate the feedback. I agree. I think this is just a bug due to the way we feature flagged this. We'll get this cleaned up.