A common but not universal complaint about the Sakai primary navigation is its limited scope with only supporting 5 tabs and having the remainders roll over to a popup menu. In scenarios with 10 or more classes or projects some wanted the ability to categorize them in some way. i.e. a grouping of freshman level classes vs. senior level classes would be beneficial taxonomy.
Is anyone else having similar issues? Our team felt so strongly that this needed to be remedied that we're moving toward using the tabs as category jump points instead of the actual class/project names. See below for ROUGH Adobe Illustrator comps of our UI modifications. I welcome any and all comments from my Sakai cohorts.
Note the addition of class name and description as well as main categories:
DHTML mouse over reveals content (18 links is our starting point) accessible on every Sakai page (post login):
Another thing we're considering is making the options link more prominent. It kind of gets lost as type in a plain bar. The default GUI design (or our current one) doesn't give it the prominence needed considering its importance.