Recipe For Effective Navigation
January 15th, 2008 | Posted in Navigation/Menu |
While surfing the web to come up with some ideas to write about this morning I stumbled onto this Study of Website Navigation Methods Paper that Fidelity Investments firm in Boston Massachusetts did while developing their website. So I did some more digging around on Website Navigation and found some interresting studies and ideas.
The Yahoo-style and Drop Down menu, both, scored low on the error report. That is a good score, in case you’re wondering. I personally would agree that over the other styles, I’d preffer these two. Honestly, I never thought about the Yahoo-style navigation while designing a website before but this actually is great, the visitor gets to see all the sub-directories, which gets him one click closer to the destination.
Drop Down menu is very easy for a fellow visitor to find their way around, the sub-categories are visible without having to click or change the page, and remember, web surfers are lazy, less clicks, less pages to go through, equals more conversions. There are some negative things about the Drop Down menus if you are not an advanced drop down menu creator. The problem is broken menus, which turn into lost business. I’ll talk about that in a bit.
According to the Clickstream Study done by University of Hamburg, top-left half of a web page is premium realestate - this is where over three quarters (76.5%) clicks happen. This also is what happens with eye tracking studies done by Hotchkiss and Nielsen. They both follow a simmilar F-shape pattern. This tells us that the best place to put our navigation is within that area, top-left half of the page.
A few other issues come up when designing navigation is the speed and functionality. The navigation style that you choose has to keep up with the speed of web navigation. With the high-speed internet acces available to most now-a-days, the hover buttons, pop-out and drop-down menus have to be lightning fast to keep up. Before the site goes live it should be tested, re-tested and tested again. Run it in several browsers, on various operating systems, make sure it works before it’s unleashed. There are so many broken navigations out there, so much resources wasted and business lost when it is so easy to prevent it by testing.
Lots of discussion going on about what a navigation link or just a link on a page should look like, many strong opinionated individuals will tell you that they religiously believe that their way is right. From what I’ve seen on forums and around the web the standard underlined link is the most effective. Using a pale dotted line to underline is another nice way to specify a link. There was time when leaving a link without the underline, looking like a “small sentence” was cool but that time has come and gone. I think that you have to use your own judgement and decide what will look good and do the job it’s intended to do. What will speak to the user, make their “trip” through your website memmorable, deliver what they are loking for and make them come back later for more. When it comes to in-body links, someone suggested placing links in the footnote, to keep the user from leaving the page before reading it to the end. Personally, I don’t know about that, it sounds like an annoyance to me.
When designing a website, it helps to remember to apply the (KISS) “keep it simple stupid” element.
