The Elements of Effective Website Design – Part 2

In Part 1 of this article, we concentrated on one element of effective website design, the user interface. The homepage is a prominent example of an interface, a page that presents information and opportunities for activity by visitors.

Many interfaces have been analyzed by usability studies to determine what makes a site easy and intuitive to use. For example, a usable homepage will answer right away the most common visitor question, "What is this site for?" But usability isn’t just about interfaces; the second most common question is, "Where am I?"

Pay close attention to this question, and carefully design your site’s architecture and navigation to avoid the third most common question, "How do I get out of here?"

Information Architecture

Whether you’re renovating a website or designing one from scratch, it’s important to spend time designing and evaluating the site’s information architecture. How do the different pieces of information connect? What’s their relationship to each other?

Most sites today are designed to follow branching menu structures. The homepage has several main categories, such as Our Company and Our Services. Each of these categories has its own menu; for example, Our Services might include Engineering, Construction, and Maintenance. There are certainly other ways to organize the architecture, many of which are still undiscovered; but web users are comfortable with the branching menus, which is an important component of usability.

Branching menus imply an information hierarchy, and you should spend some time thinking about this. What are the main categories and the subcategories, and what kind of information belongs with each? And most importantly, what grouping of information is going to get visitors most easily to what they need?

Information architects talk about broad and deep sites. A broad site will have a number of main categories on the home page, and only go down one or two more levels. A deep site will have fewer main categories, and more typically go down to a fourth level (with the home page counted as the first level). Each has its advantages and disadvantages: if the site is too broad, a user won’t get a coherent picture of your company; if it’s too deep, people can get lost down in the sub-basement.

The architecture you decide upon will be an important part of the face your company shows to the browsing public. Don’t rush the process. Assemble an architectural team of two or three key people and be ready to spend hours in front of a big whiteboard doing a lot of erasing and rearranging.

Navigation

Your site’s architecture determines where people can go, and its navigation how they get there, but in practice you’ll be designing them at the same time, since each depends heavily on the other. Navigational conventions have evolved over time, and when you use them, you’ll be adding to your visitors’ comfort level:

• Main category buttons — these may be graphical elements on the home page, and then repeated on interior pages, often as tabs or buttons across the top

• Support buttons, often down the left-hand side of the page, such as Contact Us or Help

• Interior links, using the Web convention of blue underlined type, which are especially useful to take people quickly down into a deep site

• A Home button, available on every page, which takes users back to the homepage

• An index, commonly called a "site map," which may simply be a hierarchical list or may be depicted more graphically

• A bread-crumb trail (a series of links set in small type with arrows across the top of a page) that shows where you are in the hierarchy.

Some navigational elements are commonly used, but problematical. Pull-down menus are an economical method of displaying a lot of navigational options, but it’s easy to get carried away and put in too many. They can also be hard to use, often disappearing as the user slides the cursor diagonally over to an item to select it. And search engines have to be pretty powerful to be worthwhile; too often they display the dreaded "No matches found" screen, after a couple of which your visitor will be gone.

Usability in navigation boils down to a few simple principles, of which the primary one is consistency. Whatever you’re calling a topic on the homepage, call it the same thing when we get there. If you’re displaying submenus from an interior page, make sure they match the submenus on the home page. If you’re color-coding the Our Company pages blue, make sure that some of them aren’t yellow.

Put your company name or logo on every page. And make sure your user always knows where he or she is.

Clickiness

Surfing the Web is all about "clickiness," the experience of clicking from element to element on a site and building your own portrait of what is there. Remember that visitors want to be in control of the experience; they don’t want you imposing an architecture or navigational path on them. The best sites are easy, fluid, and fun, giving visitors a positive interactive experience as they find what they’re looking for (not to mention what you want them to find).

See The Elements of Effective Website Design • Part 1

© 2003 Sullivan Creative

Information Foraging

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center, led by Stuart Card and Peter Pirolli, grabbed a metaphor and ran with it, suggesting that Web users behave like wild animals looking for food. Not only is it a colorful idea, it introduces some important insights about information architecture and navigational tools.

Wild animals make foraging and hunting decisions based on highly optimized formulas; survival of the fittest says that animals using suboptimal formulas die early. Information foraging is not a life-or-death matter for humans, but we do like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort.

According to Jakob Nielsen, "Information foraging’s most famous concept is information scent." People will follow a path toward information as long as the scent keeps getting stronger — an indication that they will be able to acquire the information with a reasonable amount of effort.

Practical take-aways from this part of the metaphor are to provide explicit and accurate signposts — links and category descriptions — and feedback about where users are and where they should go.

Once your information foragers have found their "meal," it’s only natural that you would want them to stay and get more of your information. Many pages have been written on creating "sticky sites." But as Nielsen points out, the success of Google and the spread of broadband connections have led to a new evolutionary behavior, information snacking: it’s very easy to find good information all over the place.

Given this, the research suggests that your strategic message needs to evolve from "stay awhile" to "come back often." Follow the elements of effective website design to make sure your site is easy to find, easy to use, and a nutritious snack, and they will come back.

Resources

This sidebar on Information Foraging was derived from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, June 30, 2003, which can be found at www.useit.com. Jared Spoole (www.uie.com) is another godfather of usability theory.

Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug, and Web Navigation, by Jennifer Fleming (out of print) are both good overviews of the principles of website design.

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