Sidebar.revamp May 2026
Use heatmaps. Are users hovering over the "Reports" icon but not clicking? That means your label is wrong. Iterate again. The Final Verdict A sidebar is not a sitemap. It is a conversation between the user and the software.
If the answer is no, it's time for your own sidebar.revamp . Have you recently redesigned your navigation? What worked or failed miserably? Let me know in the comments below. sidebar.revamp
By revamping our sidebar from a static list of links into a dynamic, stateful, prioritized tool, we didn't just make the UI "cleaner"—we made the user smarter and faster. Use heatmaps
Power users hate mousing to the sidebar. After the revamp, we added Cmd/Ctrl + K to jump to any sidebar link via a command palette. The sidebar became a backup, not a requirement. Iterate again
Here is the anatomy of our revamp and the metrics that moved because of it. Our legacy sidebar looked "fine," but data told a different story. Users were taking 12+ seconds to find account settings, and support tickets about "missing features" were actually about features hidden two levels deep in a collapsed menu.
