Designing good SharePoint Case Management GUI

I have been working on a SharePoint Case Management Portal Project for some time now and we've just finished iteration 3 now. When the site was first designed and built, the custom SharePoint menu looked cool. Each item had its own icon and each icon meant something as it was not really overwhelming on the eye. We've added in a whole bunch of new icons and now the menu looks terrible.

I've been browsing the web researching GUI design principles when I came across a site called IxDA (Interaction Design Association). It’s not your typical "look at this design" site but a forum for discussion regarding Design Patterns, Tools, Research and Methods regarding Web, Desktop, Mobile and any other type of Interface design. I highly recommend a read if you want to stimulate your brain into gear with some good quality discussion.

So what am I going to do about my menu. Well so far I have built up mental model of all the items that make up the menu. I have given the idea of a tree menu some thought but I find the idea of an expanding/contracting tree menu a bit cumbersome. Whilst this would certainly help with the issue of keeping the menu height small (when tree items are contracted) the thought of having to implement this in SharePoint and the Value it will add really don't seem too attractive to me. 

In terms of what we currently have, the items are grouped into two sections -  All items of type "View" e.g. view details, view notes etc were in one group and all actions items in a separate group. In all the there are 22 items which makes for a lengthy menu. Potentially too long if we want to ensure that majority of items are visible in a 1024 resolution. I like the idea of limiting the amount of clicks the user would have to do to get to a page. This means that splitting the site up into a 2 level hierarchy would not really do the job. By this mean having top level menu items that would link you through to sub-sites for a given action with the rest of the menu options provided on the sub-site. Hmmm decision decisions.

Well I’ll mess around about in Photoshop I think to see how it could look. But in the mean time check out IxDA