Pinned fields section
I’m happy you worked on the pinned fields section - which has the most potential for contextual navigation improvement.
Toggle
The dropdown is an improvement, although I would make the toggle functionality similar to any other field, which is at the left as arrow, which gives more consistency with the rest of the page fuctionality. Currently when expanding the pinned field section, the user needs to relocate the line in order to collapse it again, so I think its not so intuitive.
Improve contextual navigation experience
However, I like to underline the in my view more pressing need to redesign the pinned fields section, for the improvement of a contextual navigation experience, similar to a (sticky) persistent top menu navigation bar (often used to navigate to a parent entity which is central to contextual navigation), where it is easier to click on link instead of having to use the tiny arrows in the pinned fields. Here are some related topics about ease of contextual navigation:
- UX: New navigation menu feature: emphasize a field at the top
- New view type: Gallery View - #15 by Yuri_BC
- "Sticky" pinned fields header (or sidebar) in Entity View
- Panel handling improvements: "Minimize" and "Pin" panels
Separate features
At some point in the past I indicated that the pinned field section is currently trying to accomodate two needs: as editable tags and as a top navigation replacement. I think these two functionalities need their own implementation, because otherwise it will stay a solution that does not satisfy neither of these needs completely.