In 2016, I was asked to have myself and my team jump in to help re-design the experience. 

In order to ensure that we were successful in this project, we researched around the needs the developers had as well as talked to numerous developers around what they were looking for. There was also a ton of community feedback from the developer community which helped in getting a full breath of the different types of requests issues that we needed to consider.

From there we brainstormed around a couple different patterns and concepts. I then had one of my designers focus on doing some additional research by conducting questionnaires to ensure that the initial thinking and ideas were founded on concrete facts not theory. My team then proceeded to create rough wire frames around two approaches that made the most sense and could easily adapt based on the research findings and feedback from the developer community. From there we reached out to get additional feedback from developers to ensure that the approaches were on target.

After additional testing, it clear that the best choice was to create a top-level navigation with a drop down to allow for maximum amount of visibility of the content area and to be able to select an item and get immediately back to the current page.

We maintained right panels on the pages (as before) because developers really liked the feature and did not want to deviate from it. We also upgraded the right panel by adding in an additional document tab, enhancing the controls within the properties to provide clarity and optimization when modifying controls.

In addition to the initial five content areas, as before, 4 additional areas were added to enhance the offerings during the redesigning of the system.