I think the thing that is grabbing my attention is the menus. I really like the separation of plugins, settings and users in the 2.5 design. By putting them back in the main menu bar with equal prominence, especially with the balloons above plugins and comments, it feels like there are a lot of options.

I also think the solid colour around the outside has the effect of containing everything.

I am conscious of the fact that I really like the Habari UI, and may be comparing this to it, but WordPress has a different ethos so the UIs should not be the same.

I used firebug to make a few changes that made it closer to my preferences, I removed the green background and the border, changed the border under the menu to a 1px #efefef line. That made it closer to my preferences. If the UI features control over the colours so that I could change the colour of the tabs (in-box, todo, latest comments) to a light grey, or very slightly blue-grey then I think that would be pretty good.

I guess the problem with UIs is that everyone has their own prefences, perhaps this is telling. What a lot of people seem to have asked for is proper admin themeing capabilities.

Regarding the whitespace of that UI — I must have made a mistake by putting that My Tasks bar in there on the front page. It does look a bit cluttered that way, but what do you think about the Design section. That secondary navigation bar is absolutely unnecessary even there. I put it in just to show the flexibility of common design elements such as this vertical navigation bar which is also used for the tasks list on the frontpage of the dashboard. Users page doesn’t have it.

Do you think that even without the secondary navigation it looks too crowded?