Use and Abuse

Happy summer! One of the things I like about summer is its relative ease. It’s easier to dress for work, it’s easier to move your car, it’s easier to get your stuff in the house (no climbing over snow banks), things are casual, simple, and uncomplicated.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how web navigation should be. (How’s that for a quick shift?)

But it’s fascinating how hot a debate you can spark with a few comments about what makes a website “usable.”

Years ago, web design really was the wild west in terms of how you got from here to there within a website. People played with all sorts of options: navigation in frames, so that it always stayed the way it was, where ever you went on a site. Navigation that was totally contextual – you never really knew where you were! Navigation that was embedded in the copy itself – remember the ubiquity of “hypertext?” (There are still quite a cadre of folks who love that stuff which I find abominable.)

My colleagues and I got into a lengthy discussion, er, debate, um, battle… recently over the function of anchors and whether you can change an anchor to a nav item when you go from an email newsletter to the online version. (An anchor, in case you don’t know, is a link that usually appears at the top of a long column of information, broken by headers. Clicking on a anchor will drop you to the appropriate header in the column.)

Does this all really matter? Well, yes.

Imagine a world in which every book you pick up is governed by a different set of rules. One reads back to front, another from the middle out. Still another skips every other page. Yet another chooses to place pages randomly, but because each page is clearly numbered, you can figure it out! After all, we want you to “interact” with the book, not just read it!

I am definitely not opposed to creativity in presentation – even in a book! I have seen many books where the inclusion of graphics, or wild swings in time or place or voice, have added immensely to the value and interest of the book. But when any object becomes so difficult to use that the using of it overcomes any other purpose it might serve – unless that IS your point – you have made a mistake.

These days, there are some basic rules that we have come to expect from web and web-related information presentation that, if broken, should be broken with a meaningful purpose.

We have come to expect some sort of “top” navigation. Whether this navigation is placed at the literal “top” of the site or not, it should be clearly what it is: persistent, major groupings of information that are informationally self-evident (Contact Us) and always available for selection.

We have come to expect some soft of “local” navigation. That is, when I select Contact Us I expect to get information about how to get in touch with you. If you have 25 offices and tons of contactable individuals, you might want some local navigation breaking the contact area up by office, region, country, etc. to make it easier for me to get to the office/person that’s relevant to me.

We have to come expect a signal of some sort that a link (nav item or hyperlink) has been selected, and/or visited. For example, if you click on Contact Us, the link may highlight to a different color or size when I roll over or click it, and in some cases, it may stay a different color after I have visited it, reminding me that I have already gone into that area.

We have come to expect that “top” nav really will be at the top, and “local” nav will be at the left (because we read left to right). People like to try to re-invent this one, and I have seen it done really well. But there is much to be said for knowing right where to look to get what you want… and for how gratified your visitor will feel at not having to “figure it out.”

I spoke with a person recently who had been taxed with developing a site. He said that he had told his clients not to expect the “same old” wording for standard site areas – “I am not going to have an area called ‘About Us,’” he explained. ‘People see ‘About Us’ and they don’t bother.”

Well, actually, I think people see “About Us” and they figure, “Oh, here is where I will find information about the company’s history, profile, makeup, locations, philosophy… maybe officer bios, that kind of thing.” Granted, this may not be the “most frequently visited” area of a given site. But, like the utility closet in an office building – you don’t go there as often as you go to the bathroom, but when you need it, you really need it. And it should not be disguised to look like the bathroom to entice more people to visit it!

Part of the job of web design is to make it easy for people to understand where to go to get what they believe/think/know they want. Along the way, you may slip some interesting serendipity in their path, or they may stumble across it. Your duty is to find the most obvious and expedient way to present the user’s choices – and make sure you have included all the things any visitor might reasonably have come to your site seeking to find. And then, throw in a little bit more. (As the Louisianans call it, a lagniappe.)
But the days of forcing content down someone’s throat are over. And I say, amen to that.

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