January 14, 2005
Are Website Navigation Menus Obsolete?
My good friend "venny" and I were recently discussing an article entitled "Navigation Blindness." As "web people" we both concurred that many websites being built these days just don't make sense for the end-user.
Web surfers tend to have a mind of their own and can get "cranky" when it takes too long to navigate a website. The key though, as discussed in the article, is "trigger words."
Snippet from the article:
"Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But the fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on links or hit the back button to get there."
"Trigger words are the words and phrases that make people click on links. They contain the essential elements that provide the motivation to proceed to the next page."
Full article: Click here
Posted by Brent at January 14, 2005 01:51 PMWhat an awesome article. I think we get so caught up in the design/development of the application that we tend to forget the end result (users actually using the application)!
A strong argument in the past has been that a user needs to be able to access any major piece of the site at any point in time. I used to agree with this notion but am starting to see the validity in this author's point of view.
Why give the user access to many paths when there's most likely one distinct path to the information they're trying to retrieve? I'm definitely going to do some more thinking around this and start applying it to future projects.
Hey, did anyone see that blue monkey that just bounced across the screen?
Posted by: Dennis Baldwin at January 17, 2005 08:44 PM