One of the things attending my 2nd ever CiviCRM sprint is you’re not quite sure what you’re going to work on. My first sprint in 2023 in the UK was a lot to take in but now I had a better feel for it.
Sure I had some small items to knock out, like our docs clarifying that you can update activities thru an import (it was mysteriously missing), tested some multisite improvements, and now what?
Well, to be fair there were good camaraderie new friends made and some drinks, but we’re here to improve CiviCRM so…
Coming after the 2025 end user survey, it felt like we needed to respond better to the concerns voiced. And knowing what survey fatigue is I wanted to be sure to make the respondents time worthwhile. FWIW, the CiviCRM marketing group is working on wrapping in a continual feedback form right in the UI so this isn’t just an annual thing.
Once I categorized the issues down for the, “If you could change one thing about CiviCRM, what would it be? (Describe a specific feature or enhancement you would like)” the top three category areas for improvement were: UI/UX, Product Maintenance, and Marketing Automation.
After documenting the neat search a menu item function; I finally realized the menu gives an appearance of 3 searches on the top left navigation:
- Quick search
- CiviCRM menu search
- Search navigation dropdown
I’d grown quite familiar with using the tool as is, but now, this no longer looked quite so normal to me. This probably needs a more holistic rebuild.
Luckily, I turned around to Lena from Systopia and she was totally up for digging into how we could “re-imagine” the menu. How cool!
Now what’s even neater was I had no idea she had some UI/UX background. This was natural. So, we did quick and dirty analysis of top CRM’s, their navigation UI, took screenshots, notes and came away with a general feeling of what a new menu could look like.
The tldr: the overall trend is to differentiate between menus that serve different purposes. Particularly, we focused on looking at Nationbuilder and Hubspot as two CRM’s inspiring our specifications. And then Lena made a first draft mockup you view here. Heads up: if you want to contribute feedback, funding or both, please jump on the GitLab issue.
The cool part is this a great new project after the Riverlea re-theming of CiviCRM and can start to use the Search Kit and Form Builder tools to accomplish a new “quick search” and menu structure.
Here’s the deal:
The CiviCRM space is a community of supremely talented folks. It’s not venture capital funded so itches are scratched and while a lot of enhancements are added, the UI/UX has been lagging behind.
But now there’s a small group trying to push this forward, revising the design prototype and gathering technical specifications on how this will go about. We hope to have something to show by the time the next sprint rolls around, in the Netherlands in October!