Reducing unsatisfactory navigation states without losing consistency
I'm working on a fairly large analytics dashboard. One challenge that is occurring repeatedly is how to always display relevant information without losing consistency.
We have a set of items that can be analyzed. Selecting and changing those is always possible. It's the top-most navigational element (think: drop-down in the top navigation bar). We also have a set of analytics, grouped into pages.
Here's a simplified mock:
The problem is the following. While many of those analytic pages (X,Y,Z) are shared between different items (A,B,C), some are not.
Say we have two analyzable items A and B. For A we provide analytics X and Y. For B we provide analytics X, Y and Z.
What happens, when a user currently is on page Z for layer B and changes the selected layer to A. We came up with three options:
We stay on page Z and say "No analytics Z for layer A". The navigation stays consistent throughout the dashboard. But there a some "invalid" states and may annoy the user (Norman calls this a "Gulf of Execution").
We jump to another analytic page that's available for A (but which one?). Inconsistent navigation, with unexpected jumps, but all states are always valid.
We stay on page Z, say "No analytics Z for layer A", allow to switch pages, but as soon as the user left page Z we disable/hide it. Navigation stays somewhat consistent, no jumps, no invalid state. But feels strange that user cannot go back to where he/she came from.
This is what solution A would look like:
Here's B (notice that link to Z is removed, and page has been changed to Y, without the user doing so):
Any other/better ideas?