Web Design Ethiopia

Two major mental and time costs are involved in navigating: the cost of scanning and deciding among the range of link choices and the cost of clicking on a link and waiting for the next page to load.

When people click through to a new page, they run a risk of not finding what they need and therefore backtracking. When pages load slowly, this cost is very high, and people will spend more time carefully reading through the links and choosing the most suitable option.

On the other hand, when there are a large number of links (consider all the portals that show hundreds of options on a single page), then the cost of reading every link is high, and people will decide to try following, a link rather than finish reading the remaining options.
This cost tradeoff affects how many links we display on a given page. If there are too many, people won’t read all the options.

If there are too few, people are more likely to make an error in their selection because the labels are less informative and specific. Because pages don’t download instantaneously, people are generally more willing to read through lists of links than we expect, and so a larger number of links is appropriate.

This tradeoff also suggests that we need to minimize these costs, so keep the download time of pages short of minimize the page traversal time, and make link labels clear and legible to minimize scan time.

A popular but ill-conceived techniques is to use icons for links and to use rollovers to display the labels.

This is called mystery meat navigation (you’re not sure what meat you’ve got until you bite into it) or minesweeping (let’s roll over everything and see if any surprises pop up.

The problem with such an approach is that you’ve dramatically added to the cost of scanning through the alternatives of where to go on the web site, thus significantly slowing down site navigation.

As much as possible, try to make the navigation self-explanatory at a glance rather than forcing users through a problem-solving process.

Garden Paths
When people confidently follow a sequence of links that seems to lead to their goal only to find that what they’re looking for isn’t there, this is called a garden path, a pretty path that leads to nothing.

At the end of a garden path, people have several options: abandon the search in exasperation (a lot uncommon choice); backtrack using the Back button until they find a feasible alternate route; click on the Home button and start the search from scratch; follow the main navigation links to look in another area (saving one step versus going to the home page); or visit one of these pages that offers some help: Help FAQ, Contact, Site Map, Site Index, Search. You’ll see each of these strategies, so support each alternative.

Sense-Making
The process of piecing together a mental map of a site from the information provided is sometimes called sense-making. People may form a mental map from the moment they see the first page on your site, but they progressively refine this model as they visit each page.

Since people may follow many different paths through your site, make sure that the sequence of pages they view will add up to a coherent story no matter what path the user takes.

In forming this mental map of your site, users are also ganging the scope of your site, estimating how much information is available, how many pages are likely to be involved, how broadly you sample topics, and how specifically you address topics.

They estimate the scope of the site based on what you explicitly say is the topic of the site, how comprehensive your links appear to be, and how detailed your page content is.

For a large site, it can be very difficult to articulate for the user how much detail you provide, but communicating this may be essential to keeping the user engaged with your site.

Knowledge of the scope helps users decide if certain information will be available on your site, decide when they’ve finished reading the relevant information (very important for information foraging), and decide whether they have the time to read the information now or need to return later.
 

Report This Post