Orangescrum’s New Left Menu: Personalize Your Navigation

Every project management tool eventually runs into the same problem: the more it can do, the harder it gets to find anything. Orangescrum has grown a lot over the years – Programs, Projects, Epics, Backlog, Sprints, Resource Management, Advanced Analytics, Advanced Reports, and more all live inside the platform today. That’s a good problem to have, but it comes with a real cost. A sidebar that tries to show everything to everyone ends up being genuinely useful to no one in particular.

We’ve spent the last stretch of development time fixing exactly that, and the result is a completely rethought left menu. Instead of one fixed list of links that every user is stuck with, Orangescrum’s navigation is now something you shape around your own role and habits. A project manager who lives in Backlog and Active Sprint gets a different experience than an admin who spends most of their day in Users and Settings – and neither has to wade through menu items that don’t apply to them.

This post walks through everything that’s changed, why we built it this way, and exactly how to set it up for yourself in a couple of minutes.

The Problem With a One-Size-Fits-All Sidebar

If you’ve used Orangescrum for a while, you know the old left menu reasonably well – it was a long, mostly flat list of every module you had access to, in a fixed order, all the time. That works fine when a product has ten menu items. It works a lot less well when it has thirty.

The deeper issue wasn’t just visual clutter, though. It was that different people genuinely need different things from their navigation. A developer checking off tasks and updating status doesn’t need Resource Management sitting in their eyeline all day. A manager who lives in reports and capacity planning doesn’t need the Backlog details a developer cares about front and center. Forcing one static layout onto every kind of user meant everyone was scrolling past things they didn’t need to get to the things they did.

Rather than trying to guess the “right” order for everyone, we decided to hand that control over to you.

What’s Actually New in the Left Menu

The redesign centers on five main capabilities, all controlled from one place: Settings → Personal → Left Menus. Here’s what each one does and why it’s useful.

1. Recent Projects

If your day involves bouncing between two or three active projects, you know the friction of clicking through a full project list every single time you need to switch context. Recent Projects solves this by keeping track of what you’ve opened most recently and surfacing those projects directly in your sidebar.

In practice, this means the projects you’re actively working on stay one click away, while the ones you haven’t touched in weeks quietly stay out of the way until you search for them. It’s a small change, but if you switch between projects several times a day, it adds up to a meaningful amount of time saved.

2. Pinned Shortcuts

Pinned Shortcuts lets you take the handful of sections you use constantly – Projects, Users, Backlog, Tasks, Dashboard, or whatever your own workflow depends on – and lock them to the top of your sidebar, ahead of everything else.

What makes this particularly useful is that it doesn’t require any setup to start paying off. If you don’t manually pin anything, Orangescrum automatically populates this space with whatever you visit most, so the shortcut bar is useful from the very first login. Over time, as your habits change, you can adjust which items are pinned so the shortcuts keep matching how you actually work rather than how you worked when you first set up your account.

3. Menu Search

Grouped or not, big menus are still occasionally hard to navigate by scanning alone, especially if you’re looking for a specific settings page you don’t visit often. Menu Search fixes that by letting you simply start typing. As you type, the entire navigation filters down in real time, so instead of hunting through Organization or Process Management to find one specific toggle, you just search for it by name and jump straight there.

This turns out to be especially valuable for admins working through Settings, where there are dozens of individual pages spread across categories like Sign In and Security, Project Management, Process Management, Organization, and Plugins and Integrations.

4. Grouped Navigation

Instead of one long, undifferentiated list, the full menu is now organized into logical, collapsible sections: Plan, Work, Quality, Insights, and Knowledge. Each section expands to show its contents and collapses when you don’t need it, so you can keep your sidebar focused on whichever part of your workflow you’re currently in.

This is the change that does the most to reduce raw visual clutter. Even users who don’t touch a single toggle in the new settings page will notice the sidebar feels calmer and easier to scan, simply because related tools are grouped together instead of stacked in one continuous column.

5. Presets

Not everyone wants to build their ideal sidebar toggle by toggle, and that’s exactly what Presets are for. Instead of starting from scratch, you can apply one of five ready-made layouts and then fine-tune from there:

Preset	Best For
Recommended	A balanced default that works well for most teams and roles
Minimal	Just the essentials, with everything else tucked away
Developer	Tuned around building, tracking, and testing work
Manager	Weighted toward oversight, reporting, and capacity planning
Everything	Every menu item you currently have access to, all visible at once

It’s worth noting that applying a preset replaces your current menu items rather than merging with them, so think of presets as a fast starting point rather than a small adjustment. Once applied, you’re free to customize further – nothing about a preset is locked in permanently.

Beyond the Five Highlights: Full Manual Control

For users who want to go further than presets and automatic suggestions, the Left Menus settings page also includes two additional controls worth knowing about.

• Collapse to icons – shrinks the entire sidebar down to an icon-only rail, freeing up horizontal screen space for your actual work. This is particularly useful on smaller laptop screens or for anyone who prefers a more minimal workspace.
• Customize menu items – a drag-and-drop interface for manually deciding exactly which items show up in your menu and in what order, with Add All, Remove All, Expand, and Collapse actions available for quick bulk changes rather than dragging items one at a time.

And if none of this appeals to you, that’s fine too. The entire new sidebar experience is opt-in. Leave it toggled off, and your navigation stays exactly the way it’s always been – nothing changes underneath you without your say-so.

How the Pieces Work Together

Individually, each of these features is a small quality-of-life improvement. Together, they add up to something more significant: a sidebar that gets more useful the more you use it, rather than staying static forever.

Picture a project manager starting a new week. Their Recent Projects section already reflects whatever they were working on Friday. Their Pinned Shortcuts give them one-click access to Backlog and Active Sprint without digging through Grouped Navigation at all. If they need to check a setting they only touch once a quarter, Menu Search gets them there in two keystrokes instead of three levels of clicking. And if they’re setting up a new teammate’s account, applying the Manager or Developer preset gets that person to a sensible starting layout in seconds, instead of leaving them to figure out thirty menu items cold.

None of these features depend on each other, so you can adopt exactly as much of this as is useful to you – even just turning on Menu Search alone is a meaningful improvement if that’s the only friction you’ve felt.

How to Set It Up

Getting started takes about two minutes:

• Go to Settings → Personal → Left Menus.
• Turn on the new sidebar experience using the toggle at the top of the page.
• Individually enable or disable Recent Projects, Pinned Shortcuts, Collapse to Icons, Menu Search, and Grouped Navigation, depending on what’s useful to you.
• Optionally, apply a preset – Recommended, Minimal, Developer, Manager, or Everything – as a starting point.
• Fine-tune further under Customize Menu Items if you want full control over what appears and in what order.
• Click Save to apply your changes.

You can return to this page at any time to adjust your setup as your role or habits change – nothing here is a one-time decision.

This update is part of our broader push to improve the overall Orangescrum experience. If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve also recently redesigned Backlog to include List, Tree, and Board views with visual sprint progress tracking – you can read about that and other recent updates on our What’s New page.

Try It Yourself

Log into your Orangescrum account and head to Settings → Personal → Left Menus to start personalizing your navigation today. If you’re new to Orangescrum, start a free trial and set up your ideal sidebar from the very first day, instead of adjusting to a fixed layout that may not fit how your team works.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to switch to the new left menu?

No. The new sidebar experience is entirely optional. If you leave it turned off, your sidebar stays exactly as it was before this update – nothing changes automatically.

Will applying a preset delete my custom menu setup?

Applying a preset replaces your current menu items with that preset’s layout rather than merging the two. You can still customize the menu further immediately afterward, so nothing is locked in permanently.

What happens if I don’t pin any shortcuts myself?

Orangescrum automatically fills your Pinned Shortcuts with whatever menu items you visit most often, so the shortcut bar is useful even if you never touch the settings manually.

Can I change my menu settings later?

Yes. Go to Settings → Personal → Left Menus whenever you want to adjust pinned shortcuts, switch presets, toggle grouped sections, or reorder items – your setup is never final.

Does this affect other users on my account?

No. Left Menu settings are personal to each individual user, so your changes only affect your own view and won’t alter navigation for the rest of your team.