Designing Navigation

Its a fact:

People won’t use your Website if they can’t find their way around it.

You know this from your own experience as a web user. If you go to a site and can’t find what you’re looking for or figure out how the site is organised, you’re not likely to stay long – or come back. So how do you create the proverbial “clear, simple, and consistent” navigation?

Scene from a Shopping Centre:

Picture this: It’s Saturday afternoon and you’re headed for the local shopping centre to buy a chainsaw.

Following last weeks newsletter we continue to speak about Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. This week we are discussing "How we really use the web"

Over the past ten years we have spent a lot of time watching people use the Web, and the thing that has struck us the most is the difference between how we think people use websites and how they actually use them.

When we’re creating websites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organised things. And weighing their options before deciding which link to click.

What they actually do most of the time is glance at each new page, scan some of the text and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.

Common Sense Approach to Web Usability- “Don’t make me think!”

Over the course of the next 12 weeks Identity will provide a series of topics, helpful tips and guides about Web Usability. The first topic we are discussing is called “Don’t make me think!”

Clients, customers and people we know often ask us:

“What’s the most important thing I should do if I want to make sure my website is easy to use”

The answer is simple. It’s not “Nothing important should never be more than 3 clicks away” or “Speak the user’s language” or even “Be consistent”.