Best practice website navigation

We were recently asked to review a website for usability. One of the key pieces the client wanted to look at was navigation. Surprisingly, there’s not a huge amount available on the web about this. Even Jakob Nielsen, the guru of website usability is pretty quiet on the subject. So we pulled together a few thoughts and rules of thumb when it comes to creating a good website navigation:

Website users go to websites with goals in mind and perform tasks in order to achieve these goals. Information seeking is one of the most common goals on websites and especially intranets. Navigation is the primary tool for in-site information seeking. A good navigation makes for fast and successful information seeking.

Website navigation has undergone much standardisation over the years. Navigation bars, drop-down menus and sub-navigations are found across most sites, as are standard labels such as “home”, “about”, “contact us”, etc. Users sub-consciously expect sites to adhere to these standards. If sites don’t follow these standards, information seeking can be greatly impaired.

Secondary navigations (not to be confused with sub-navigations) are often missed and confuse users as to the categorisation, structure and priority of information presented.

Navigation labels should use concise and common language as this aids information seeking. Jargon should be avoided.

If you’ve got any any other navigation tips to add, please drop us a comment.

Why everybody’s using enterprise 2.0 except the enterprise

Once upon a time, they invented weblogs. Weblogs caused a big stir, and spread around the world in a very short time. In parallel, Web 2.0 was becoming a catchphrase, as people recognised that the time was ripe for participation, collaboration, and bottom-up rather than top-down. 

After a while, the buzz cooled down, although millions of people continued blogging, and websites continued to get the Web 2.0 treatment. Everybody had a blog, and the focus was moving to what they said rather than how they said it. Web 2.0 had come of age everywhere.   

Everywhere, that is, except some of the world’s biggest corporations. In our experience, a lot of people in these large companies know about collaborative software, Web 2.0, and blogs. They see the value (often having watched how their own kids use the stuff), and are keen to implement them. Convinced by the idea of Web 2.0, they start asking around about how to put it into practice, and at that point come up against any number of people who’ll tell them why it can’t be done.

And they’re often right, considering that enterprises plan their IT for three or five years into the future.  As Andrew McAfee, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, points out in his blog, the key hurdle is usually technology. “…security and access control remain key concerns among technologists, and they’ll have to be addressed before most IT departments give their blessings to Enterprise 2.0.”

What’s more, Andrew says, these tools are unlikely to spread like wildfire around the enterprise anytime in the near future. 

“As I wrote at the end of last year, my most likely scenario for the near-term future of Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere between niche deployment and spotty mainstream adoption… I believe that managers and companies that are in fact willing to do this work will gain valuable capabilities and quite possibly get a leg up on the competition.  But can you see why I think there might not be a lot of them, at least in the short term?”

See also “Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business” (Information Week) Thanks to Globally Local, Locally Global for the pointer. 

David Harbottle

An argument in favour of taxonomy

We’ve been talking about the usefulness (or otherwise) of taxonomy in automated content management at Content Formula recently.

At its most basic level, taxonomy allows pieces of content to appear in the most relevant sections of a site.

For example if the Financial Times wanted to publish an article about a European government bailing out an energy firm with a big complex loan, the editor might decide to make the content appear in three different sections of the site – Europe, Finance, and Energy. Instead of publishing it three times, he simply needs to tag it correctly for it to appear in the three sections.

Among the disadvantages of taxonomy are that it can be over-complex where simplicity is required. And when you create a taxonomy it must mean something to the reader, and ultimately must speed his or her journey to the information they’re looking for. Creating meaningful (semantic) taxonomies isn’t always easy.

But this sentence from Nielsen’s Alertbox today is a great argument in favour of using taxonomy to make sure content can be found in the right place, at least in a big intranet:

“…at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity.”

The rest is here.

David Harbottle

How can writing effective headlines and blurbs help visitors navigate your site?

Whether you run a public website or a secure intranet, you’re likely to use headlines to get people moving around the site and clicking through to other sections or pages. There are several reasons why it’s worth spending a little thought on them.

• As a navigation aid, explaining what the reader can expect to find when they click on the headline
• To entice the reader to click through, and use the site to the maximum
• To improve the number of hits from search engines
• To retain the design and balance of the page

But it’s difficult to measure the effect of good headlines in a systematic way, and as a result the usability gurus offering tips don’t necessarily agree in every respect. Very often, then, your judgement is based on experience and gut feeling.

Having said that, here’s some advice from Jakob Nielsen that’s worth considering:

• Headlines should be written in plain language: no puns, no “cute” or “clever” headlines
• No teasers that try to entice people to click to find out what the story is about
• Skip leading articles like “the” and “a”
• Make the first word an important, information-carrying one

And from Poynter, some tips on writing effective blurbs:

• They’re an aid to navigation, but readers only skim them
• Blurbs encourage reading and scrolling on homepages, but don’t necessarily encourage clickthroughs
• People focus primarily on the left third of the text in blurbs – get the keywords in that area

David Harbottle

How mature is your intranet?

I’ve just got back from IBF Live – an annual conference run by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. The forum brings together a collection of intranet managers, communications people, IT people and others from FTSE 100 and Global 200 companies.

For me there was one overriding theme of the conference: intranet maturity. As with many things in the typical organisation, the corporate intranet is on a maturity curve so it’s only a matter of time (and effort, of course) before things will improve. There was a general consensus amongst delegates at the IBF that our intranets are generally poor – right at the start of the curve. But you have to go through this pain in order to progress. People were frustrated with the role that senior management plays in driving their intranet; how politics prevents progress; how their intranets have become vast and chaotic dumping grounds; some people complained that people did not visit the intranet or were not contributing to it.

But the vision of the mature intranet is definitely there. So what does a mature intranet look like? There are a few examples out there. Cisco and IBM are often touted as having model intranets, the best in the world. In fact, both these companies recently claimed that ROI studies on their internal webs had shown values in excess of $1bn. Here are some of the features that these mature intranets have in common:

• There is a sharp focus on usefulness, not just useability and information
• Senior executives are active sponsors, clearly seeing the value of the intranet and pushing it
• Employees are smarter with technology and are active and direct contributors of content to the intranet.
• Employees are the judges of the intranet and as such, influence its development
• There is a blurring of the lines that normally divide content, data and applications – the intranet becomes the interface between the organisation and its people

Dan Hawtrey

Is there a place for employee participation on intranets?

Most people are aware of the buzz surrounding things like weblogs, “citizen journalism”, and even podcasting. They’re often used as examples of how the web is allowing greater participation from its users. But is there a place for any of this participation on a serious business intranet?

We’re currently looking at ways to develop plain old bulletin boards with two of our clients. The aim is to give employees a secure place where they can ask and answer questions, report the latest competitor sightings, or just sell their stereos. Such a board can be particularly useful when potential contributors are all over the world.

Bulletin boards are basic, but practical and useful. They’re a good way for companies to dip their toe in the water and start encouraging employee participation via an intranet.

At the other end of the scale, the BBC is usually cited as the organisation that’s been most adventurous in this direction (follow this link to find out how). Employees run hundreds of internal blogs, participate in dozens of wikis and thousands connect via a network called talk.gateway. Participation on this scale has its drawbacks, but it has great potential for eliciting new ideas and pushing collaborative projects forward. So there’s a huge range of possibilities from the very basic to the elaborate. And there’s a place for all of them on an intranet, as long as the aims are clear.

There’s no shortage of opinions on how best to use these evolving resources to improve communication within a business. Here’s an article asking whether or not you should allow employees to blog on your intranet. Business Week describes how business can use Wikis to replace e-mail. And here’s a list of bulletin board providers frequently used in business.

David Harbottle