Design Questions

February 27, 2008

Removing left-hand navigation

Our consultant recommended removing our site’s left-hand navigation on top and 2nd-level pages (and making it an option only on the 3rd level), and instead integrating the navigation elements into the main content well. Is this a newly accepted best practice?

Your IA consultant may have good data on which he is basing his suggestions. End-user data would be very valuable.

That said, general best practices you want to consider include making navigation and terminology predictable and consistent.

Navigation and terminology should be predictable, meaning that the information is where users would expect to find it and the name or label of the information clearly and accurately describes it.

Be consistent with your navigation. Your current website has some sections where the left side is totally redundant with the top horizontal 2nd-tier navigation, while elsewhere those areas offer different navigation options. You should pick one method and stick with it: Either 2nd-level horizontal navigation drives the next level of navigation on the left that is unique to each page, or eliminate the 2nd-level horizontal and deliver 2nd-tier navigation on the left of each page.

Filed under: Design, Usability | Permalink

March 22, 2007

Wizards for startup pages

For setup pages which are generally only used for getting started, do you recommend wizards to guide the user through the steps?

Wizards are very useful in some circumstances, but can be very annoying to users in others. When deciding on whether wizards are the right approach, consider the experience and skill sets of the users who will be responsible for setup pages.

If the users of the system you are developing regularly configure and set up similar systems, then a wizard approach, which usually takes more time and chunks data into smaller subsets, may annoy and frustrate those who just want to check boxes for preferences and get started using the system.

If, however, users of your system will have to make fairly complex choices that include words and preferences that they may not be familiar with, a wizard may be the best choice.

Other considerations include the length of the setup pages. If a setup page is really only one or two pages, it might be best to keep the information short and provide appropriate within-page links to more help.

Filed under: Design | Permalink

March 15, 2007

“Rabbit hole” hierarchies

When is a hierarchy too deep, and what are the alternatives to using a deep hierarchy to access and organize information?

Hierarchies are often abused, plagued by issues that can lead to a frustrating user experience. Hierarchies can become overloaded, creating an Alice in Wonderland-like experience down a never-ending rabbit hole. Besides being tedious to navigate, deep hierarchies can take up valuable horizontal screen real estate. They can cause extra clicks to resize windows or force the user to guess at the truncated information. Large hierarchies can also introduce performance issues, taking several seconds to expand a single node.

When a hierarchy becomes overloaded, it’s time to examine the design of the user experience at a higher level. Ask whether there’s a better way to organize the information architecture or overall navigation scheme to take some of the burden off of the hierarchy. For example, some of the higher-level nodes in the hierarchy should be broken into separate navigation.

Another remedy to the overload dilemma is adding a drop-down or other filters that limit the information displayed by one or more attributes. For example, add a drop-down above a hierarchy that filters the information contained in the hierarchy by date or status.

A more sophisticated solution to improving the hierarchy experience is adding search functionality. Searching a hierarchy allows the user to drop into it at a deep level without having to make the entire trip down the rabbit hole. Searching can be as simple as a keyword match, or something more in-depth, like providing entire paths as a result set.

An example of this is eBay’s revised navigation paradigm for classifying items on their site. Previously, eBay users had to click through five or more levels to ensure that an item for sale was listed in the proper category. For example, suppose you wanted to sell a coffee press on eBay. To ensure that it was displayed in the right category, the user would traverse a path similar to this:

collectibles > home > kitchen > small kitchen appliances > coffee making > coffee press

The above example illustrates a seven-level hierarchy—and that’s for those who know what they’re doing. There are many decision points in categorizing an item that may cause the novice eBay user even more clicks. eBay’s new navigation adds a search paradigm on top of the hierarchy structure. Users save time by searching on the name of an item. eBay then suggests a categorization(s) or path for the item. The paths that best match are auto-assembled for the user. The user can choose a suggested path in its entirety, or customize parts of it.

There’s no hard and fast rule when using hierarchies. Their use really depends on the situation and the user audience. However, if users need to go more than three or four levels deep in a hierarchy, it’s worth examining other options.

Filed under: Design, Content | Permalink

March 01, 2007

Right-hand navigation

Our site uses a right-hand navigation, rather than the traditional left-hand navigation. We've tested this extensively and the results have always been very positive. Experts tell us to move the navigation to the left. Should we listen to experts or our users?

If you’ve done extensive testing of your website with the correct types of users and the right sample size, and the users had no trouble with right-hand navigation, then trust the user data over expert opinion.

While it’s true that left-hand navigation is more common and more expected than right-hand navigation, remember that standards and guidelines merely provide a starting point for design. In absence of data to support going against a standard, the standard should be followed. However, we’ve seen several instances where, because the user audience was different from “the norm” or because of other causes, a standard wasn’t the best answer.

Filed under: Content, Design | Permalink

February 21, 2007

The 3-click rule

Is it important that users be able to get to any content in a website within 3 clicks?

We hear at least weekly of companies enforcing the “rule” that users must be able to get to any page in the site within 3 clicks. There are several problems with this rule.

One problem is scalability. In very large or complex websites and web applications, the rule just doesn’t scale. If your website has several hundred or more pages, to expect users to be able to get to any one of those pages in 3 clicks means you may be overloading the global navigation structure, the number of links on a page, or other mechanisms for getting from page to page. Trying to make sense of all of that information at once takes users a long time.

The 3-click rule also is what we call a false metric. Making pages accessible within 3 clicks has no inherent value as a metric to the users of a site or to your business goals. What might matter, though, is efficiency (how quickly users can complete their tasks) or how easily users can find what they need. Do users have to call tech support or use other resources that cost the company money to find the information they need?

In a wonderful paper called Designing for the Scent of Information, User Interface Engineering notes that what users do expect is that every click makes them more confident they’re on the right trail to get to the information they need. As long as users are confident they’re heading in the right direction, then they are not likely to abandon the site if it takes a click or two more to get where they’re going.