VIA Interaction

Friday, June 29, 2007

Turning the standards upside-down

So much of what we do is simple: Get people to click on the things they are looking for.

The hyperlink started it all, and it was a pretty good system. People have pointed out that the standard blue color is not the best for the human eye (has to be Nielsen, but I don't have the cite). But people using the Web got used to it pretty quickly, and we still don't see anything that can beat it in terms of scannability and as an affordance.

Unfortunately, when the hyperlink is the only way to move through the Web, all the pages looked like this page at the the World Wide Web Consortium.

Creative directors, designers and our clients soon balked at this. (We have a brilliant creative director at VIA who has come up with some of the best interactive ideas we've had, but I joke that left alone with a project he would create the first Web site without a single link, button or interactive element.)

With technology like Flash and DHTML in the toy box, some pretty horrid interfaces emerged.

We can confidently predict that if we expose navigation choices (rather than place them out of sight -- even temporarily -- in menus or dropdown lists), the people who visit our Web sites will find the things they are looking for faster.

We can also confidently predict that creative directors, designers and clients will hate it. "Cluttered." "Busy." "People will know to click on the header." [Insert your own frequently-heard complaint here. ]

And some number of visitors, at least when they are asked, will feel the same way. As I have been preaching for a few years, it matters whether people like what they are using. A lot.

In fact, just this morning I was talking to a young colleague who was considering spending a few hundred more dollars on an Apple laptop than a comparably-equipped Windows-based laptop. Seems her boyfriend is a recent convert. She can't quite figure out why she wants to spend the money when she is saving for law school.

I think she wanted to hear that the Apple machine was significantly easier to use and that justified the extra expense. It is quite a bit easier to use -- but not significantly for everyday tasks, I don't think. (I have a Mac at home that can run Windows XP, but I live on the Mac side. I use a ThinkPad tablet on XP at work. My wife has an iMac, my daughter a Dell and an old iMac.)

The difference is that my colleague's boyfriend loves his Mac, and so will she, probably, and that's why she is going to pay "more" for it.

Before I wander further down any of my well-worn paths, the trigger for this blog is something Apple has done in a redesign of its Web site.

Apple's designers avoid dropdown menus in the top navigation bar. Instead, they put a navigation panel at the bottom of each page. The panel has a breadcrumb at the top -- the location and name of the current page, and I found that a bit confusing (and plan to ask other people what they think in a little burst of my annoying colleague usability tests).

Beneath that, though, is a fully exposed, site map-style navigation with all the "local" content (the other pages in the section of the site you are visiting) visible. The links are not underlined, which is an approach we have had success with in lists like this. On many pages the panel is white and the type is dark, setting it off quite effectively against the main content of Apple's new Web pages, which typically have a background shade.

Scroll to the bottom of the iPod + iTunes main page to see the navigation panel for that section (with a dark background) and to the bottom of the iPhone Get Ready page to see the same treatment with a white background.



This simple inversion of patterns (the navigation is on the top of the page, or the left side, and usually connected to the section title) allows Apple to present a much clearer view of the content available, in detail rich enough to enable visitors to make easy comparisons when trying to choose the page most likely to have what they are looking for. It is an idea worth trying.

posted by Tim Beidel at 6/29/2007 01:54:00 PM

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