Web Site Navigation: How Much is Necessary? (Part 1)

Commentary by: Mike Osswald, Strategic Director

Most people don't give much thought to navigation and wayfinding in the physical world. As we go about our day, we make dozens of very quick decisions about how to interact with the world and the objects in it. We don't give it much thought when it goes well, because industrial designers, architects and urban planners have spent considerable effort to understand and design a more usable physical world.

Of course, when navigation systems fail (consider out of scale maps, confusing interior signage), they can become a source of great frustration and wasted time.

In the virtual world of the Web, we tend to encounter difficult navigational systems much more frequently (too little, too overwhelming, too fancy, too ambiguous) because there are few standards and thousands of creators. (And it's all so new!) Excellent solutions are all the more important online, considering that much of the time the goal is to get the audience to actually buy your product or service.

The challenge for all non-dynamic sites lies in designing one content organization and one navigational system that works for all of your site's visitors. You might think that creating one Web site for “everyone” means lots of navigation and lots of links. However, that is not necessarily the case. After performing the steps described below, I think you'll see that the majority of your visitors' needs can be met effectively without excessive navigation.

Your Audience's Needs Must Drive Content

Usability studies have shown that most visitors will muddle through a poorly organized site. Maybe they'll even find the exact information they are looking for. But will they recommend your site to anyone else? Will they avoid your site the next time they are in the market? The truth is, if you haven't designed around your users, you don't know. Even if you already have an established site, this process is a helpful study.

1. Begin by breaking your site's audience into groups. A fun and very effective process is to create various personas, i.e., the “dreamer”, the “planner”, the “scientist” that represent these groups. Your content and navigation system must be organized to benefit these user groups - if you find users depending on a search box or you feel the need to make the site map more prominent, then you likely have poorly organized content, not ignorant visitors or difficult products or services.

2. Put yourself in the shoes of each “persona”, and consider your primary information needs. Put these needs in a logical sequence (i.e. educating, selecting, buying). If your site has anything to do with selling or with assisting the marketing of your products, you should see that this sequence lets users “jump-in” wherever they see fit.

3. For each persona, think about the words you identify with; avoid quirky and vague synonyms (Inquiry Basket, Beauty Boutique), forget your internal methods of organizing for now. Put your content into these major “buckets”.

4. Consider secondary information needs that may be important to fringe users (or your own marketing needs), such as “our liberal return policy”. This will be important when you consider secondary navigation. These content areas will be hard to put into the previously created buckets, but internal page navigation can be used to get users to these pages when it is appropriate to do so.

At the conclusion of this process of creating “personas” and insuring that your content works for each of them, you will see that you have relatively well-organized content with category names that are easy to differentiate, yet each audience (and the majority of your visitors) will find what they need quickly.

You will also notice that your personas are not traveling aimlessly throughout your site; in fact, they have come to your site with relatively clear goals, and are satisfying these goals without much fuss.

In the next issue of Hanson News, I will follow this process through the next step - determining how much navigation is necessary, and which navigational elements work the best for your company's site.

Related Items:

  • The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: This book by one of the creators of Visual Basic describes why so many computer applications can end up as hard to use “bloatware”, and shows how personas help you design usable products.