Finding your way around

Summary#

Every tool in Metric Vault has its own address, so it can be bookmarked, shared with a colleague, and reached with the browser's Back button. On top of that sit four navigation aids: a breadcrumb trail, a Back button in the top bar, a hover menu on each rail icon, and two panels holding your favorites and your notifications. This page explains each one and the rules that govern it.

Purpose#

A product with around seventy tools has to solve one problem well: getting somewhere and getting back. Without that, people stop exploring, settle on the three tools they found first, and never discover the rest.

So navigation here is designed around returning. Clicking a section takes you somewhere useful rather than to a menu. Every move is a real browser history entry, so the browser's own Back button works exactly as you expect. And the tools you use repeatedly surface themselves in the favorites panel rather than needing to be hunted for again.

Overview#

How it works#

Addresses#

Every screen has an address of the form #/<view>, appended to the dashboard URL. Some examples:

metricvaultai.com/dashboard#/onpage        On-Page SEO Checker
metricvaultai.com/dashboard#/doverview     Domain Overview
metricvaultai.com/dashboard#/kgap          Gap Finder
metricvaultai.com/dashboard#/library       Library
metricvaultai.com/dashboard#/account       Account

The home screen is the exception: it uses the plain dashboard URL with no fragment, so you never end up with a redundant #/dashboard.

Two consequences worth using. First, you can bookmark a tool and land straight on it next time. Second, you can send a colleague a link to the exact screen you are describing. The link does not carry your result, only the tool; to send a result, use a share link instead. See Sharing a result by link.

Clicking through the rail#

Clicking a section icon does three things at once: it highlights the icon, refills the tool panel with that section's tools, and automatically opens that section's first tool. That is deliberate. You land on something you can run rather than on another list.

The side effect to know: clicking Site Health opens Site Audit, which is a metered tool. If you wanted a free one, click the tool you want in the panel after the section opens.

The hover flyout#

Hovering a rail icon opens a compact menu listing that section's tools, so you can jump into another section without abandoning the one you are in. Its rules:

• It never appears for the section you are already in.
• It closes when you move away, on Escape, on any scroll, on a window resize, or when you click a rail icon.
• It flips to the other side of the icon if there is no room on the right.
• It is a pointer interaction and does not open on a touch screen. On a phone or tablet, use the command palette instead.

Breadcrumbs#

Under the top bar, a trail shows your position as Dashboard › Section title › Tool label. The first crumb carries a house icon and returns you home. Every crumb except the last is clickable, and clicking one creates a real history entry, so Back still works afterwards.

Sections that contain only one tool, such as Blog or Library, show two crumbs rather than repeating the name.

Some screens are reached only from a button inside another tool, and have no place in the rail. Those keep the sidebar as it was, and take their crumb label from the screen's own heading. Reloading the page still returns you to them.

The Back button#

The leftmost control in the top bar is Back. Two design decisions make it predictable:

• It is always visible. It does not appear and disappear as you move around; instead its enabled state is the signal. Its tooltip reads "Back to the previous tool", or "Nothing to go back to" when there is nowhere to go.
• It falls back to home. If you have no in-app history, for example because you opened a bookmarked tool directly, pressing Back takes you to the dashboard home screen rather than leaving the application.

The browser's own Back and Forward buttons work too, and follow the same trail. Each navigation also resets the main area's scroll position to the top, so you never arrive halfway down a page you have not read.

Tabs inside a tool#

A few tools are presented as a strip of tabs above the content, because they are closely related and people switch between them constantly. Each tab is a full tool with its own address and its own credit cost; the strip is a shortcut, not a sub-mode.

Only the first tool of each group appears in the sidebar. The others are reached through the tab strip.

Results also use tabs, but for a different reason: to put the summary first and the raw data last. That is covered in Executive summaries and result tabs.

Favorites and recents#

The star icon in the top bar opens a panel headed Favorites & Recent, with two sections: Favorites (N) and Recent analyses.

• Recent analyses fills itself. Every tool run records the target and the tool used, so the list is a history of what you looked at. It keeps the last twelve and shows the most recent eight.
• Favorites are domains you mark yourself, with the star on any row. The star's tooltip reads "Add to favorites", and "Favorited" once it is set. You can keep up to twenty. Use it for the handful of domains you check every week.
• Clicking a row takes you back to the tool you used, with the domain already filled into the input, so re-running is one keystroke.
• The × on a row, tooltip "Remove", takes it out of the list.

Before you have run anything the panel says: "Run a tool to start building your history. Favorites are for domains you check repeatedly."

Notifications#

The bell icon opens a panel headed Notifications, with a Mark all read button and a footer explaining the sources: "Alerts from Watchtower, Rank Alerts, and Scheduled Reports."

Each row shows a severity of High, Medium or Low, how long ago it happened, a title and a short body. Unread rows carry a red dot, and the bell itself shows an unread count, displayed as 99+ beyond ninety-nine. Clicking a row opens the relevant screen in a new tab and closes the panel.

Opening the star panel closes the bell panel, and the reverse, so only one is ever open. For the full alert history with filters, use Track & Report → Notifications & Alerts Hub: see Notifications and alerts hub.

Getting somewhere fast#

Three habits cover almost everything:

• Ctrl+K to reach any tool by name. See The command palette (Ctrl+K).
• The star panel to return to a domain you were working on.
• Library → Saved Work to reopen a result you already produced, at no cost. See Saved Work.

Full keyboard coverage is in Keyboard shortcuts.