The Chatterbox

Friendly Navigation (Usability Part III)

Seems like I'm on a roll today!

Next, let's take a look at what makes your navigation friendly for your visitors.

First, whether we like it or not, people have been conditioned over time to see the main navigation for a site in one of two places. Either at the top of the page or vertically down the left hand side of the page.

As much as you might like to put it somewhere else, I would still advise having your Persistent navigation block in one of those two places. To do otherwise can throw some of your less savvy users for a loop and make them think right off the bat. That's something we're trying avoid remember?

Now you may be asking yourself what I mean by the term Persistent Navigation. All that is is the navigation that leads to the main pages or sections of your site., The links that will normally appear on every page of your site.

Often, especially with larger sites, you will have a small set of links that need to be on every page and other subsets that are specific to a particular section of your site. The Persistent links let people move effortlessly from section to section of your site. And also to move back to the Home page if they get lost. (Hey, it happens to prepare for it!)

One the "problems" with surfing a web site is that it's hard to convey the feeling of movement. Plus you need to remember that people will click on the first thing they see that looks like it might be what they're looking for. There's no penalty for doing that, as it's easy to hit the back button a time or two, so you can expect this trend to continue.

In the grocery store (to use our earlier example) you have tangible things around you to tell you when you've just walked in the door, when you get to the coffee aisle and where exactly you are in the store at all times. And you're far less likely to head off to the milk or sugar aisle looking for coffee simply because you like both when you're having a cup.

Gaining this sense of movement, and the location you are currently at in the grand scheme of things, is much more difficult to attain with web sites. But you really do need to do it.

There are several ways to accomplish this task by using some visual clues to your visitors. You can change the link that leads to the page when someone is on it, so that when their on your Coffee page the link to that page is a different color than the rest. You can provide breadcrumb navigation, where across the top of the page it'll say something like Home > Coffee. You can also state plainly in a headline across the top of the page where they are in such a way that it's obvious to the surfer what section they're in.

I tend to favor using at least two of the above methods to make sure I'm getting the message through. I always try to make sure the first line and title tag of the page has some connection to the link that was clicked. So when someone clicks on the Coffee link in our example they arrive on a page that has "Coffee" as both the Title of the page and as a Headline right at the top of the page.

The same goes when they click on my Gourmet Coffee (subset) link.

This approach not only helps users of the site know where they are --and what any page is about-- but it also helps the search engine spiders determine exactly what the page is about. So it's a win-win all the way around.

The main things to remember regarding your navigation in my mind are:

• Keep your Persistent (main) links consistent throughout your site. They should be essentially the same on every page of your site, with the possible exception of your Home page.


• Make sure your links are in a prominent location on the page and where people would expect to see them. Normally either at the top or in the upper left of the page.
  
• Make sure the text shown on your link says what it leads to. Don't get too cute and use a link that says "Mmmm-mmmm good!" for a link that leads to your coffee page!


• Give your users a couple of visual cues to indicate where they are currently at on your site.


• Make sure your title tag and headline of each page corresponds to what the link to it says. It doesn't have to be exactly the same text, but it should be very obvious.


• Always give your users an easy and effortless way to get back to your home page in case they get lost.


• Most importantly, construct your links for your real human visitors, not for the search engines. In other words, don't load them up with long keyword phrases just for the sake of doing it. If your pages and links are constructed properly they should naturally contain your keywords.

That should cover the basics of creating a friendly navigation scheme for your web site.