5 Navigation and Usability Ideas to Steal

If you have a web site that looks very avant-garde and slick, but you are finding that visitors are mostly bouncing (leaving after viewing only one page) or that visitor traffic is not going in the direction that you would like, this article will give you some suggestions that you can use to help visitors feel right at home, and stay awhile.

Sometimes well meaning and highly creative designers want to push the envelope and invent something fresh and new (and of course, “better”), yet this admirable motive is often swiftly crushed by strong and immediate customer opposition.

This frustrating situation can be particularly hard on the designer who was really proud to have been thinking beyond the box. But my contention is that the designer should usually be less of an innovator, and more of a thief.

The human mind is a marvel, and much of its usefulness lies in its ability to quickly deconstruct a situation and ever after, take it for granted. Web site layouts are one of these mental constructions that are well ingrained in your viewer's gray matter.

So with that in mind, here are five fairly non-invasive themes in web design that are so frequently recycled that you can be assured that they will make most viewers feel at home as soon as your page loads. They're not “genius” ideas, quite the contrary: they're very ordinary and comfortable ideas.

1. Your logo should be at or near the top left of the page, and when clicked on, it should send visitors directly to your home page.
2. The most important (primary) navigational links should be at the top, either in a tab or menu format, and there should be as few as you can manage without compromising ease of use. A good rule of thumb is 6 or less primary links.
3. The less important (dependent) navigational links should appear in a smaller format, and in a way that very clearly shows their relationship to their parent links. Using the tab structure, they will appear below and in a similar color to the parent on activation. Using a multi-level link structure, they will appear as a consequence of activating a primary link with clear cues such as arrows or colors that they're related to the active parent.
4. There should always be a simple search box available unless you have a very small site because a large number of visitors will search first and navigate only as a last resort.
5. Put a text-based “Home” link somewhere on every page. Some people will look for that rather than knowing the convention of clicking on your logo, and there are some SEO reasons to have it there also.

These themes can be reintroduced into your slick web design in some cases with a minimum of damage to the overall layout, and each one will be one further step toward reducing the amount of learning that customers have to do before they can use your site.

As Steve Krug, author of the venerable web design book “Don't Make Me Think” observes, “We don't read pages. We scan them.” That sums it up well, making your site more scannable will make it more usable.

As with all changes, it is a very good idea to do some user testing to determine effectiveness. Conducting user tests can get pretty complicated, but you can do quite well by literally grabbing someone off the street to test your new interface. You can then explain that they're supposed to pretend they're wanting whatever you're selling, then watch them, take notes on where they struggle, and be sure to give them a nice gift and “thanks” on the way out.

The comfort of your web site is almost always more important than that of your office in today's market, so make sure you are truly making your customers feel at ease and in charge.

Copyright 2010 Matthew Steven, GeniusWeb.com LLC.
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