Simian Design

February 2, 2005

What Should Drive Site Organization And Design: Consistency Or Flow?

Wow. This is a wonderful read with some really big ideas. Maybe not good ideas, but they’re BIG.

Robin Good questions What Should Drive Site Organization And Design: Consistency Or Flow?. Basically, he advocates taking everything you know about page design, walking over to a window, opening the window, and throwing it right out. At the very least turn it on it’s ear.

Henrik Olsen also advocates turning navigation on it’s ear. Or at least recognizes that navigation isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Top menus, left menus and breadcrumbs that are placed throughout the website are at best ignored - at worst distracting.

Others, such as Kristoffer Bohman, conclude that pervasive navigation (the one that appears across all site pages) should die since it’s rarely needed, hard to interpret and takes up valuable space.

According to Jakob Nielsen there is no need to link to all sections from each and every page on a site.

We should limit pervasive navigation to five or six basic features and let people go back to the front page, if they want to start from the top. Instead, we should focus on getting users to what they want and provide useful links to related content.

So basically designers continue this old idiom of “from every page to every section” without really looking at the end result.

I can’t imagine a site, a working site, that really follows these principles. But the ideas are very sound I think.

• Identify users’ goals on each page.
• De-emphasize or remove any elements that don’t help to accomplish the goal.
• Emphasize any elements that help to accomplish the goal.
• Focus on the users’ goals

Hmm. Some really interesting ideas in there. I’m not sure. I’ll probably end up taking a bit away from this, and rolling it into my normal processes.

Post Info

Tagged As Big Ideas, Strategy, UI Design, Usability, User Experience Design

Comments are Open (3)

Posted at 07:52 AM

Comments

phnk

Some of the ideas raised here generally apply to writing as a whole. Hey, did I miss something about the new page layout here?

Posted by: phnk | February 2, 2005 08:57 AM

Tony

I can see where these ideas would apply to writing.

The concepts of removing all items not important to the task, such as navigation, are the ones that seem, well, different. Drastic. Crazy.

As for the design? I've just taken away the basic images, and did a small code-shift. I'm moving towards a new design though, it needs it.

Posted by: Tony | February 2, 2005 09:01 AM

eliot

I have to disagree with removing all navigation. I love having major categories available from any page. I feel trapped if I have to constantly go back to the main page.

Posted by: eliot | February 2, 2005 10:55 AM