Your everyday tools now sit in a sidebar organised around you.
The redesign reorganised Spacewalk around a sidebar that groups your tools by who you are, covering the boards you belong to, the boards you curate and your company tools. Role previews, guidance panels and unsaved-change warnings came with it. Admins juggling several boards notice it most.
What the redesign changed
The old navigation grew feature by feature, which is how most navigation ends up. The rebuild organised it around the roles people actually hold rather than around the order things were built.
- Most-used features moved into a sidebar, opened from the menu in the main header.
- The sidebar is grouped by relationship, the boards you belong to, the boards you curate and your company tools.
- Updates, alerts and announcements sit together in a notifications sidebar behind the bell.
- A recently viewed widget on board pages picks up where you left off.
- Role previews let members skim a role in a sidebar without losing their place, configurable per board.
- Forms track unsaved changes per section and warn before you leave or switch tabs.
- Tab panels carry short guidance explaining what each area is for.
Terms and policy links moved into the menu to declutter pages, and the "Powered by Spacewalk" footer marking now inherits your own colours.
What it means for your community
Members browse faster. Role previews are the change they feel, because skimming a role in a sidebar and returning to the list is a different activity from opening a page, deciding it is wrong and going back. Over a session that is the difference between looking at four roles and looking at fifteen.
For an alumni network, where people visit occasionally rather than daily, the recently viewed widget also matters more than it sounds. Someone returning after three weeks does not remember what they were considering, and being shown it removes the small effort of restarting that quietly ends a lot of visits.
A professional association gets a subtler benefit. Members who belong to a board and also work for a member company were previously navigating something that assumed one relationship. Grouping by relationship means both are visible, and neither is buried.
What it means for your team
Less time lost. Unsaved-change tracking is the least glamorous item here and probably the most valuable, because losing a half-written role description to a mistaken tab switch is a genuinely dispiriting way to spend ten minutes. Save and cancel now appear only when something has actually changed, so the controls mean something.
Guidance panels also shrink the training burden. Most people administering a board are not doing it full time, and an occasional user returning after a month gets a short explanation of what an area is for rather than having to ask a colleague or search the knowledge base.
Company admins got a redesigned view of their posted roles as part of this, with status badges and the ability to view applicants, edit, close or duplicate directly from the list. That pairs with the applicant review tabs, so moving from a role to the people who applied to it is one step.
Application history became more informative in the same pass, showing the effective employer, the posting and application dates, and sortable columns. That sounds like housekeeping until you are asked to account for a cohort's activity months later, at which point being able to sort by date rather than reconstruct a sequence is the whole job.
Do members need to learn anything new?
Very little. The board itself works as it did, and the changes are mostly about where things are reached from rather than how they behave. Members who only ever browse and apply will notice previews and little else. Admins have more to absorb, but the grouping follows how people describe their own situation, so most find the thing they want on the first attempt.
Getting started
The sidebar opens from the menu in the main header, and role previews are configurable per board under Manage Marketplace. The marketplace admin guide walks through the sidebar and each management area, with the guidance panels shown in context. The rebuild is recorded in the redesign changelog entry.
If you are running more than one board, the job board for associations and job board for alumni networks pages cover multi-board setups. Spacewalk runs a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, and a board goes live in about an hour.