There's been some progress made on structure, but there will always be opinions on how to layout. At the 1st level we have:
Overview
Initial Setup
Sharing
Advanced Management
Solution Integrations
Within initial setup... there are many sections including configuring storage.
There is a new lefthand side menu to emulate browsing a document. See this storage page as an example:
https://docs.ixsystems.com/hub/initial-setup/storage/
Any strong views on how to improve this 1st level?
3 observations immediately come to mind, I've commented on the top level menu structure separately below to keep that separate.
1) CONSISTENCY OF ACCESS
If you look for the v12 docs such as they are from the webUI you get one presentation. But if you want to browse the v12 docs from the I systems website "support" link, its called something completely different ("technical library? Info hub?). The appearance, the layout, the findability, even the title itself, are a real problem as they vary dramatically depending how you access the docs.
I'd suggest now that the side menu is fixed (thank you!!) I would look at the different entrypoints to the docs/technical library/info hub/guide. I'd try to ensure they are uniform, and that however you find the provided support info, the format is similar, findability is similar, the nomenclature is similar (is "technical library" the same as "documents hub" and if not, what's the difference?). If your link took you to one specific section of the documents (eg "v12 guidance") make sure theres always a clear link to the top level entrypoint of the entire.support info/docs hub/technical.library/whatever its called, and so on.
That kind of consistency really makes.a difference in UX.
2) HOW THE NEW DOCS HUB IS ENVISAGED TO WORK IN PRACTICAL TERMS
I'm still struggling a bit to understand how IX envisages its docs.
Clearly there needs to be guidance *somewhere* about each screen, each option, and about "what you need to know about [X] before using that capability/option". Whatever its called, however its packaged and organiseed. Call that a functional description, which goes down the capabilities, screens and options, explaining how they work and what they do.
IX seems to want to move to a task based list, "how to create a pool, how to do X", and I'm having real difficulty seeing how that doesn't become the same thing in the end, with lots more repetition/duplication.
After all, to do 'initial setup" you need to understand how to choose a pool design, pros and cons of different designs, hardware demands that different options might imply, and what each different control and option does, within the "create pool/dataset/zvol" UI and their options.
That's effectively the same functional "what does X do" information as above/before, and its clearly not.possible to substitute it by vague recipes without that level.of understanding. The entire system has options, and users need that info.
So I feel your task based thing perforce either remains vague and unhelpful, or else degenerates into a thin extra layer on top of the 11.3 style of info.
If you could clarify this, it would help a lot, because I suspect few of us can envisage how IX plans it to work in day to day usage. For example, in your task oriented docs, where is it envisaged one goes, to find what the "sync/async" setting does, or implications of different pool structure choices, or case sensitivity options in SMB, or some option in the "edit dataset options" webUI, or whatever else it may be? Can you clarify how one is envisaged to find that kind of stuff - and how/where it fits into the structure, in the envisaged docs?
3) FINDING RELEVANT DOCS
Again, the 11.x docs, release notes etc will often be misleading for v12- perhaps damagingly so in some cases. So a way is needed to.specify the kind of doc you want to.search in, for.the search box, not return all hits in all docs. All this needs to be if minimal, is a drop down with checkboxes listing each version, "release notes" and "other documents" for now?