Surfing around some usability websites, I’ve found a great article about eyetracking statistics collected by Nielsen and Tara Pernice Coyne(the Nielsen/Norman Group’s director of research), which provided the designers with some basic understandings of proper information placement.
“[With eyetracking] we can see that a user may navigate the page of an interface that houses the info she wants,” she said, “but if the text is poorly presented, or the navigation is cluttered, or there are too many superfluous images so she cannot easily find what she needs. This is a lost opportunity.”
They’ve summarised some of the main points of information distribution, according to its types, like: image usage, content development etc.
Some of the results were even a bit funny in image analysing test due to gender difference of questioned audience, anyway it’s worth of reading for everyone, since most of us, knowing these basics, like to forget about them, of simply underestimate their importance.
Design
Content Management, Design, IT, Usability, Writing
Going back to the roots of site architecture, we have to take by default that:
“Every information should be accessible“.
In this case all the navigation should be:
- Be easy to learn.
- Be consistent throughout the website.
- Provide feedback.
- Use the minimum number of clicks to arrive at the next destination.
- Use clear and intuitive labels.
- Support user tasks.
- Have each link be distinct from other links.
- Group navigation into logical units.
- Avoid making the user scroll to get to important navigation or submit buttons.
Tabs
One of classical ways of arranging a good website navigation is - tabbing: logical division of the data among the directories, and subdirectories, would be a comprehensive solution for an end-user. The most viewed tab menus:
(Hewlett-Packard)
(Apple Computer Inc)
These tabs give a clear, logically simple,site navigation so the user will be able to track website architecture, and navigate through the content.
Footer Navigation
With the appearance of sitemaps, or well designed header tab navigation, footer became more less used for storing less important links of the main page.
(Blogging Pro)
Therefore, those “scroll-till-death” sites like Flickr partially duplicate their header links and move them to the footer section.
(Flickr.com)
Summarizing all the examples mentioned, the developer should be very careful on the content aspect of the website, and according to it base its navigation. Some of the basic ideas of Accessibility can be found on Web Accessibility initiative from W3.Org
Design
Design, Flickr, IT, Usability