Navigation Aids: Examples - Page 21

The top row of black buttons is standardized across the site and provides a clear sense of site-identifi-cation relative to the rest of the Web as well as an easy way of getting to the home page and to the search page. I would have preferred a more promi- nent placement of the search button, which seems somewhat lost between a series of less-important buttons. The real problem with this page is the highly confusing, second-level navigation bar. The layout of the five options under “Information” makes it look as if the local information space has two tracks, each with its logical sequence of pages. The current page is highlighted (good), but it’s strange that it’s the successor to “Microsoft cul-ture” and not to “interviewing” because it con-cerns the scheduling of interviews. In general, a flow chart layout should be used only when the information space is in fact structured as an ordered sequence.

The “back to” link is a valuable navigation aid that allows user to easily move up a level, but the key phrase “employment opportunities” is rendered as a typographic mess that is inconsistent with the rest of the site, making it difficult to read the sec-ond-most-important word on the page, “employ-ment.” (The most important word on the page is obviously the site name, although there is no need to clutter up the navigation bar by listing it twice.) The page wastes an opportunity to serve its audi-ence better: A link to the home page for the Society of Women Engineers event would have been very helpful to a potential recruit who was thinking of showing up to meet with the Microsoft recruiters.

One final issue is that I snapped this screenshot three days after the end of the Society of Women Engineers conference. Sites need to have procedures in place to remove outdated infor-mation immediately.

Jesse Berst’s AnchorDesk places links to related, longer stories in the right margin. The left rail is dedicated to site-wide navigation, following a fairly com-mon convention. Users will often overlook the left column completely (except if they deliberately want to locate a different part of the site). But the links on the right are a great way for Berst to recommend additional articles that are relevant to his current topic.

Avoid 3D for Navigation

Every few months, the trade press reports a new technology to navigate websites in three dimensions. In particular, we see a lot of designs where users have to fly through a three-dimensional space in order to navigate. Most of these systems hurt users more than they help, for several reasons: Navigating a 3D space is in fact unnatural for us humans. It is much easier to learn to move on a surface than in a volume. Input and output devices are both 2D (typically a mouse and a screen), so the so-called 3D interfaces are in fact projections rather than true 3D, meaning that movements and manipulations are indirect and awkward. Information space is n-dimensional, where n is a very big number, so there is no inherent reason why a mapping to 3D should be any more natural than a mapping to 2D. Much of the information is hidden when the user has to fly through a 3D space, so it may in fact be harder to get an overview (which is the primary purpose of a navigation aid). None of these 3D interfaces have been subjected to user interface evaluations to measure whether users can perform any typical navigation tasks any faster than with a simpler 2D design. These designs may make for cool demos, but they never seem to actually help any real users perform any real tasks. The bottom line is that 3D is no magic bullet that makes the navigation problem go away. Even if somebody makes a 3D interface that works, we still have the fundamental problems of structuring the information in a way that makes sense to the users and matches what they want to do.

Help Users Manage Large Amounts of Information - Page 20
Designing Web Usability
Subsites - Page 22