People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.
Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible.
Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.
With repeated practice, users develop imprecise memory of objects and content in a UI, but still need additional visual and textual signals to help them find a specific item.
If users don't notice a navigation menu, they won't use it, and website usage will plummet. Here are 5 design guidelines to increase the visibility of navigation menus.
Users want to do the least amount of work possible to get to a desired web page. However, "work" is the sum of difficulty presented by each click and not the number of clicks in itself. Here are some tips for making a path easier to navigate.
Is it enough to have a search feature on a website? Or do users also benefit from a well-designed navigation interface? Depending on the nature of the site, the balance between the two can change.
To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.
Tree testing is a supplement to card sorting as a user research method for assessing the categories in an information architecture (especially a website IA and its proposed or existing navigation menu structure).
There's a footer at the bottom of every web page, but the design of this utilitarian page element is often overlooked, making the website perform below its potential. In our usability studies, users often turn to page footers for important information and tasks, making them an integral part of the overall experience of a site.
In addition to a site-wide store-locator link, location-finder links in key areas anticipate users’ needs and make it easy to find a physical location within the context of their task.
A key question in information architecture (IA) is to decide the number of items in navigation menus (including global menus and local menus). 4 main factors determine the answer, but it's not 7, despite a common myth.
Footers can be found at the bottom of almost every web page, and often take many forms, depending on the type of content on a website. Regardless of the form they take, their presence is critical (and highly underrated).
Support wayfinding by including breadcrumbs that reflect the information hierarchy of your site. On mobile, avoid using breadcrumbs that are too tiny or wrap on multiple lines.
People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.
Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.
If users don't notice a navigation menu, they won't use it, and website usage will plummet. Here are 5 design guidelines to increase the visibility of navigation menus.
Users want to do the least amount of work possible to get to a desired web page. However, "work" is the sum of difficulty presented by each click and not the number of clicks in itself. Here are some tips for making a path easier to navigate.
Is it enough to have a search feature on a website? Or do users also benefit from a well-designed navigation interface? Depending on the nature of the site, the balance between the two can change.
Tree testing is a supplement to card sorting as a user research method for assessing the categories in an information architecture (especially a website IA and its proposed or existing navigation menu structure).
There's a footer at the bottom of every web page, but the design of this utilitarian page element is often overlooked, making the website perform below its potential. In our usability studies, users often turn to page footers for important information and tasks, making them an integral part of the overall experience of a site.
A key question in information architecture (IA) is to decide the number of items in navigation menus (including global menus and local menus). 4 main factors determine the answer, but it's not 7, despite a common myth.
Hick's Law (or the Hick–Hyman Law) says that the more choices you present to your users, the longer it takes them to reach a decision. However, combining Hick’s Law with other design techniques can make long menus easy to use.
Anything done by more than 90% of big
sites becomes a de-facto design standard that must be followed unless
an alternative design achieves 100% increased usability.
iCab, a web browser introduced in 1999, uses the LINK tags from the page headers to provide additional navigation links to the users. This structural navigation provides a valuable alternative to users.
People are not frogs, making it difficult to navigate 3D computer spaces: stick to 2D for most navigation designs. Shun virtual reality gimmicks that distract from users' goals
Instead of emulating the real world, websites should build on the strengths of the medium and go beyond what's possible in physical reality: be non-linear, customize service, ignore geography.
Four years of progress in Web browsers have given us more fancy presentation but almost no improvements in helping users navigate the Web and getting the information they need.
Subsites can be used in hierarchical information spaces to give particular prominence to a certain level of the hierarchy which is used as the subsite designator.
There is now a profusion of choices when it comes to web browsers, and market shares can change rapidly. The only certain trend on the Internet and WWW is that change happens so quickly that it is impossible to predict what will happen. Even so, the following changes ought to happen, so hopefully they will be the next trends.
This chapter from Jakob Nielsen's 1995 book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond explores a variety of mechanisms for helping users navigate in digital environments including history lists, bookmarks, overview diagrams, and navigational dimensions and metaphors.
Hypertext systems include a Presentation level, a Hypertext Abstract Machine (HAM) level, and a Database level. The following sections describe each of the levels in further detail, starting at the bottom. (Chapter 5 from Jakob Nielsen's book, Multimedia and Hypertext.)
A review of the Macintosh CD-ROM versions of The Manhole, the Time Table of History, and the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog with emphasis on their usability and their support of hypertext navigation. Based on the discussion of these hypertexts the following general principles are found to be useful for analyzing hypertext user interfaces: Navigational dimensions and their explicitness, directionality and literalness, landmarks, locational orientation, history lists, and backtrack mechanisms.
Originally published as: Nielsen, J. (1990). Three medium-sized hypertexts on CD-ROM. ACM SIGIR Forum 24, 1, 2-10.
