Google rolled out an updated design in the console yesterday. And it's some kind of disgrace. Let's look at the new sidebar menu.
The first and most wonderful thing about it - on hover a scrollbar now stably appears, which reduces the width available to content. For context, this block is fixed, you can't dynamically change its width. When the content size changes there's not always enough space for text and some items start wrapping. We'll chalk this up to the length of words in Russian, there's no such thing in English. GitLab and Telegram open in neighboring windows behave completely adequately.
The second problem is the complete inconsistency of all these items. The top ones are the most important by their logic. They have no background by default, the color of text and icons is gray, when selected the background turns into a blue rectangle rounded on the right side. Below you won't see anything like this anywhere.
The items below are some kind of tree structure. However, at the very top level there's no arrow that would show expandability. So we only learn that the structure is tree-like through trial and error. And for some reason they're initially blue, like the others on hover, but the color of text and icons on them is black for some reason. When clicked their background color doesn't change at all, nested items are shown as cards. One level below items are no longer separated by such cards, they're just drawn with a left indent with a barely noticeable dividing line. Here everything looks pretty good at first glance, but hover or clicking on any of the final items highlights the top group in bright color, while the specific selected item remains on a white background with not very noticeable blue text.
Let's pile on some more small things that aren't as strongly related to the latest changes. The "All apps" button at the top is completely different. There the icon size and font are different, and on hover the appearance unlike everything else doesn't change at all. BTW clicking on the Google Play Console header does the same thing, so the separate button is also pointless.
When clicking on any menu item that redirects to "another page" I only see the click effect after a successful request. That is, you literally sit there for a second not understanding whether it clicked or not. For an SPA this already doesn't look good.
They don't let you expand more than one item at any nesting level. So on any click everything else closes and you have to search for the needed item again.
I love console updates. Every second visit to it over the past 15 years you have to relearn because they changed something. If only there was someone on their team who could give feedback like this before releasing to prod. But no, they make crap time after time. Moreover, we as developers understand that doing different things takes longer and is more complex than doing the same thing. This makes it even more absurd.
PS. Vibes of the joke about a letter to a match factory. Are you all crazy or what? 🧘