Explorative Navigation
January 05, 2005 | 
18 Comments
[via Digital Web] I just got through reading Henrik Olsen’s article on navigation blindness. It’s a must read for any UI or Web designer. He’s taken several interesting theories, from several well respected sources, brought them together, added a bit, and points out some great reasons why we should all take a long hard look at how we view traditional forms of navigation.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines lately, and part of the reason stems from a talk Jared Spool gave at UIE 7 a few years back about trigger words and the scent of information. (Henrik covers this idea quite a bit in his piece.) That talk got me to really think of alternate ways to help folks get to what they are looking for, and boil it down to user goals.
On a recent project I worked on, a portfolio site, we need to find a better way to have people explore the work without placing a huge, un-categorized client list into the nav—which was the first idea—we came up with something more like the scoreboard nav you’d see on Flickr combined with lots of related item linking within the content. It’s to be determined how well this will work, but it’s this kind of thinking about navigation and how users get to what they want and need, that Olsen is talking about.
Give it a read and let me know what you think. If nothing else it makes you question, and that’s a good thing.
Filed under: News
Comments
1. Shaun Inman said:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately to as I’ve been working on larger and larger projects. For my personal site I’ve been considering un-navigation: a dominant search box and content heavy on metadata with heapings of dynamically-generated related content links. No preconceived navigation whatsoever. Might be a fun experiment.
At least more interesting than those inside-joke schemes that often get pushed through client projects (the one’s where the information you really want is buried away in a 5th tier link that only someone familiar with the inner workings of the company/organization could find logic in the chosen hideaway).
Posted on January 5, 2005 01:53 PM | #
2. Adam Michela said:
I’m with Shaun. In redesigning my site, I’ve been thinking alot about “un-navigation” as he calls it.
Should be interesting seeing as my site is forums. Forums with millions of un-tagged, un-reliable posts. Yick! I was I was smurter years ago :|
We’ll see how we do.
Posted on January 5, 2005 02:13 PM | #
3. Adam Michela said:
Question.
Is “Scoreboard Navigation” an appropriate term for “Flickr Nav”? It sounds good, but I’ve always seen it referenced by a term for which escapes me at the moment.
What is it usually called? (Assuming we’re talking about links sized by popularity)
Posted on January 5, 2005 02:20 PM | #
4. Keith said:
Shaun – Can’t wait to see that!
Adam – I guess I should clarify. I meant the multi-column mini-sitemap stuff at the bottom of some of their pages when I talk about scoreboard nav. I think you are talking about weighted listst. Which are another great alternate nav idea.
Posted on January 5, 2005 02:41 PM | #
5. Adam Michela said:
AH! Yeah weighted lists was the word I was looking for.
However, you gave me a new definition I was in desperate need of that I had never heard, Scoreboard Navigation.
I’ve been calling it, indescriptively, Footer Navigation when explaining while showing people my redesign. Nothing quite as, uh, “dumbifying” as classifying a navigation style strictly by its geographic location in your page ;)
Thanks! :)
Posted on January 5, 2005 02:46 PM | #
6. Tom said:
The more I have started using flickr the more I have stopped trying to be clever. The interface and the way they use tags, image sets, so the content just flows togeather is just great.
When you first get an account on flickr your photos dont show up on the main site, you account has to be checked over just to make sure your not a naughty boy or girl. Flickr but a nice yellow button with “Why arnt my photos showing up?”, its these sort of things that makes it oh so easy, they give enough of the right information so people dont have to ask stupid questions. Infact I came from flickr straight to ebay and just felt strange, using all these sections and subsections.
Still to answer the question at hand, I would love to do a metadata website, its just actually builting of the beast that scares me. Does anyone know about or use any software thats quite good at building and updating metadata stuff?
Posted on January 5, 2005 04:05 PM | #
7. David said:
I like the ‘scoreboard’ nav system idea. Only i think it needs to be used very carefully.
I often find with systems that prioritise the most used links that you have to spend a few moments adjusting each time it changes. Does anyone else get frustrated with the Windows system that hides unused links in the Start menu or Word or whatever? It would usually only work where you don’t want to get anywhere in particular and are just browsing.
Although it’s sometimes slow, categorised navigation works because you remember where the link was from last time.
Posted on January 5, 2005 06:00 PM | #
8. david gouch said:
I think the article is specifically challenging the navigation of sites like those for newspapers. Sites where every section and sub-sub-subsection is linked. That type of navigation is unusable and unused, yes, but Olsen is advising we scrap the navigation bar completely. This is a bad idea because navigation is more than navigation: it’s branding and it shows the scope of the site.
The first thing I did after reading the article was scroll up and examine the navigation bar. It said Home, Search, and About. Looking at it, I wondered if the Guuui site had any content besides that article. The simple addition of the navlink “issues” would have told me everything about how the site’s content is organized – and that there was content.
A site without navigation would look very empty.
Posted on January 6, 2005 12:17 AM | #
9. Small Paul said:
It’s smart stuff. Amazon do do this very well - I’m sure I’ve bought more stuff from Amazon because they’re so good at gently suggesting loads of stuff I want.
In the blogosphere, Simon Willison is great at this too. At the end of a post, you got related entries. I’ve read lots more of Simon’s stuff this way.
Posted on January 6, 2005 03:55 AM | #
10. Tom said:
Call me crazy, but doesn’t persistant navigation allow you to do exactly what these pundits say is the right thing? They say we are goal oriented and that we click look, back click look etc. Ok fine - the left nav allows me to do that. I click on “furniture” I see subcategories of chairs, I click on chairs, I click on bar stools, and bang I have my bar stool.
Had furniture not been the right category, I could have hit home again, but - even better - because the global navigation is persistent, I can click and try another link from right there. And of course, I can use search.
I just wonder that part of the reason people seem to “ignore” navigation schemes is because they *are* working, not because they *aren’t.*
It’s like the controls on my car dashboard. I don’t take any notice of them at all until I use them. But they are always there when I need them. But I do in fact “ignore” them.
It’s not that I’m fully against what these guys are preaching, but for all their arguing I see no SOLUTIONS or examples. Sure Flickr does some nice things but hey look at the top of every page - global, persistent navigation - how bout that.
I for one would be very interested in some new ideas, some “un-navigation”. I’ve been waiting to see it for years now! :) I guess I’m just tired of reading the same old “reports” with no new results.
Frankly, I’ve tried myself to come up with new ideas and come up empty, so I should turn down the suck myself.
So I guess my long, drawn out point is this: Yeah yeah, blah blah blah, show me something instead of talking about it. :P
Tom
Posted on January 6, 2005 05:24 AM | #
11. Boyink said:
Thanks Tom! I was having the same reaction, moreso with every reference to this article that I’ve come across.
Posted on January 6, 2005 06:16 AM | #
12. Keith said:
Tom – I don’t think anyone is suggesting you not have traditional navigation, only that you have other ways to get people to what they’re looking for.
Having said that, there are problems with traditional navigation, that I’m sure anyone who’s worked on a site of any size have come up against. What about items that don’t fit?
A site map usually dictates your navigation, so can you see how your information groupings might cause a user some consternation?
Has anyone but me agonized over a site map? Trying to put square pegs in round holes? Trying to get stakeholders to visualize something other than their org chart?
I think the problem goes beyond the fact that people ignore the navigation. It’s about how we search and browse for information.
As far as showing you something. How’s this – it’s a simple thing – look at the top of this article. I list, in the right hand column, my last 5 entries. I put these here so that when people find my site via google, perhaps on a strange entry. This isn’t navigation. There are more examples of this, again, I’ll refer you to Flickr.
Also, maybe there is a reason people don’t show you something. Sometimes a seed planted and understand the thought behind something is more useful.
Just a thought. ;)
Posted on January 6, 2005 08:37 AM | #
13. jeff said:
Also, maybe the usability gurus are trying to create a market for themselves. Noone gets fed by providing free solutions. :)
This is weird because it has rarely happened in the past 5 years :) :)
Posted on January 6, 2005 08:44 AM | #
14. Nick Finck said:
Tom: I agree that persistant navigation helps people access information, however you have to look at the studies to see the detail here.
Let me use your example… say you did find that bar stool you always wanted… then what? What if there wasn’t a “buy now?” option on that page? What if you ended up on that page from a google search or RSS link yet it wasn’t the bar stool you wanted.. wouldn’t it be a good idea to show a list links to other bar stools, or better yet, thumbnail navigation for those other bar stool designs?
This is just one example. David mentioned the navigation on GUUUI. He’s right.. what if there had been a link at the bottom of the article, just after you finished reading it, for “see all of our previous articles”? ..right now they have a related articles list which is helpful.. but what if you really wanted to know if they had articles on something not related to the topic at hand.. like, say, color blindness or something… that link to their archive would be handy. Wouldn’t it?
I know I made a bunch of “what if”s there, but I have also done some actual user studies on Digital Web Magazine as well.. you know, actually watching how the user uses the site. I found that when I had the nav on the right-hand side (our pre 2004 design) users never really saw it. They were coming in via RSS feeds, bookmarks to specific articles, google searches for specific keywords… and they found maybe one article or page read it and missed a whole archive of information on that same topic. Moving it to the left-hand side helped solve part of that problem… adding related links and contextual links helped a great deal… but that is a per article solution. Globaly adding a faceted navigation also helped quite a bit.
Posted on January 6, 2005 08:55 AM | #
15. Chris Vincent said:
What I’ve been seeing a lot lately is having a dominant sort of “process diagram” on the front page which guides users step-by-step on what they want to do. For task-oriented sites or for showing potential new members (for community-oriented sites) what the site is for, it’s a great approach to navigation.
Two examples off the top of my head: Blogger and Bloglines.
In a similar vein, functions in the site can be grouped into individual tasks, as on Mapquest.
In general, these approaches succeed because they are both informative to the user, minimal, and very prominent. Eliminate all but the most important things to the most users, and put the rest in the footer. Look at Feedburner, for example.
Finally, I remember reading an article some time ago about how users have no sense of “where” they are in a site, let alone its navigation scheme. With that in mind, I try and think of navigation less in terms of where the user is on the site map and more in terms of where they’re trying to be. Really, it’s nothing new. But when the concept is applied to navigation specifically, some innovative ideas could come out.
Posted on January 6, 2005 11:15 AM | #
16. Alex Kadis said:
I was wondering if anyone could show an example page of the “Scoreboard Navigation … the multi-column mini-sitemap stuff at the bottom of some of [Flickr’s] pages,” it seems interesting, but I could not find it anywhere on Flickr’s site (I don’t spend much time there, don’t have an account)
On a slight digression from this topic, I am planning to make a site of links (more than 400 of them) what type of navigation would you guys suggest? Scoreboard, A-Z index, Weighted Lists, search, all of the above, or a combination of them?
Thanks,
Alex
PS: Keith, sorry if the 2nd part of my post is too self-centered, please feel free to ignore it ⦣x20AC;“ no hard feelings :-)
Posted on January 10, 2005 12:07 PM | #
17. Tom said:
I see your points of course. I too have struggled with the site map/square peg thing. One thing along these lines are pages like privacy, about us, etc, that are not in your global nav. How do you indicate where they are? Do you leave your global nav ‘blank’ or ‘unindicated?’. I posted about this at http://www.pixelmech.com/notebook/2004/11/pixelposer-1 .
Of course I would expect to see some suggestions on other bar stools, buy now buttons etc. And I agree with you guys that these things would be integrated, along with a global nav, into whatever new idea you might come up with.
So, who has some new ideas?! ;)
Posted on January 11, 2005 06:12 AM | #
18. Joe said:
I’m anxious to see an exampple as well. I have no idea how to do it.
Posted on January 11, 2005 07:50 AM | #
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