Site Critiques: Effective and Ineffective Navigation
Author: Larry Israel
Date: Wednesday, October 1, 2003
Digital Camera Resource Page (DCRP)
http://www.dcresource.com
I find the navigation on this site to be very effective. I can easily find whatever I want. Throughout the site, top navigation is used, which lists all 8 of the site’s areas, enables you to move to any of them, and clearly indicates which one you’re in at the time. Nothing earth-shattering in that, but it’s the additional navigation features that make it easy to find and move to whatever you want.
These additional navigation features change depending on where you are in the site. In other words, the additional navigation features are inconsistent, but in my opinion there’s a good reason for this. Different ways to get around are needed within different areas. This is especially true in the Message Boards area, where buttons appear for various message board functions and navigation. The home page includes a select (pull-down) menu that provides quick “jump to” access to the site’s most popular content: reviews of about a hundred camera models. In some parts of the site, there are no additional navigation features.
One thing I that I think detracts from the site and its navigation is that the Buyer’s Guide is not really part of the same site. The Buyer’s Guide appears in the main menu, but it’s a completely different site with a different name, look, and navigation structure, without any links back to the DCRP site.
On the whole, the navigation on this site is very successful.
Wiki Wiki Web
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WelcomeVisitors
I was very excited to discover this site several months ago. The site is about Wiki, a web-based discussion system in which anyone (including “visitors”) can fairly easily and instantly create new pages, and anyone can edit or delete any web page. The Wiki software also powers this site (and thousands of other sites). Wiki is quite an interesting system, and I may even implement a Wiki web site sometime, but navigation is definitely not its strong point.
This site has the most atrocious and difficult navigation I’ve ever encountered. (It’s a huge site with over 25,000 pages!) To its credit, there are several not-so-hard-to-find pages that provide useful navigation tips and other introductory information. There are also quite a few unusual, innovative navigation features. And fortunately, there is a search link at the bottom of every page, just about the only thing that makes it possible to find what you’re looking for.
Believe it or not, you won’t find a menu anywhere on the whole site!
With the exception of a couple links in the footers, all links are in the body text. Of course, the body text is different on every page. The site has no hierarchical structure whatsoever. Without hierarchical organization, there’s no such thing as “you are here” — that’s impossible — there’s no there there (as Gertrude Stein once wrote). It’s a massive collection of unorganized pages, although there are some navigable relations between them. These relations are quite unorthodox and interesting, perhaps even brilliant at times. I’m sure many of these linking features are quite useful, but it takes quite a while to figure out how they all work. There are categories, but they don’t result in any kind of menu.
It’s all very chaotic, but kind of cool at the same time. If you’re the type of person who loves to use the web for free association and spontaneous browsing by clicking whatever link happens to catch your fancy at the moment, with little concern for a goal, you will probably find navigating this site to be interesting, maybe even enjoyable. But for those of us (like me) who expect the world and the web to be at least a little structured, this site is the ultimate navigational nightmare.
Navigational chaos seems to be part of the plan, and while I happen to like much of Wiki’s decentralized philosophy, this site could be vastly improved by organizing everything hierarchically into categories and adding menus to every page. Some categorization already exists, but it’s being used only minimally as a way to organize the site. Many people could organize the site over time. I’m reasonably sure that it would be possible to design and build into the Wiki software a multi-participant navigation-creation and -maintenance method that would not violate the free-spirited nature of The Wiki Way (as the Wiki community likes to call their way of doing things). The participants are probably quite capable of that, but seem to have little or no interest in it.
Wiki appears to be a great community-building tool. Despite the fact that Wiki is touted as being simple to use, I think Wiki’s navigational complexity serves as a major barrier to entry that weeds out all but the most-dedicated outsiders; a barrier that seems to be desired by the close-knit community within.
— Larry
Postscript: After I wrote this, I decided to post it to the Wiki Wiki site. Within a few hours, there were many interesting responses. I replied to one of them, and there was quite a bit of further discussion of my navigation critique. You can read it at http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?AnOutsidersReviewOfWiki.
The responses confirm one of my conclusions: the site’s users think organizing it hierarchically is undesirable as well as unnecessary. They think they already have plenty of good navigational options. I generally disagree, but the site definately has experimental navigation in spades, worthy of investigation.
