Primary Navigation vs. Structured Content
Kristoffer Bohmann said Primary Navigation Must Die:
Primary navigation bars provide shortcuts to main sections on a website and is displayed on most or all pages. I argue that primary navigation bars should be removed completely for three reasons:
- Navbar links are rarely needed,
- they are often hard to interpret for users, and
- they take up valuable space in page top/left side on all pages.
Jakob Nielsen also said this two years ago. So why do so many sites still use them?
Because primary navigation is a web design standard. Five months before Jakob asked if navigation was useful, he stated Jakob’s Law of Web User Experience:
Users spend most of their time on other sites. Thus, anything that is a convention and used on the majority of other sites will be burned into the users’ brains and you can only deviate from it on pain of major usability problems.
Jakob spoketh, and so it was. Primary navigation stayed. But as the web evolves, are sites (especially homepages) depending less on primary navigation and more on structured content? I wanted to find out. I couldn’t imagine getting around on certain sites without the navbar, so I tried a little experiment. I visited three major websites - Amazon.com, Best Buy, and Macromedia - to find products without using search or the primary navbar.
The first item I wanted to find was an OXO chef knife on Amazon. Using their alternate side menu (not the primary tabbed navigation), I arrived in the chef’s knives section of the Kitchen & Housewares store with just three clicks. The OXO Good Grips Paring and Mini Chef Knife Set was the third item listed on the page.
Next, I went to Best Buy to find a Linksys 10/100 PCI network card. The navbar listed Computers & Peripherals as an option, but no navbars allowed! Another path to the same section couldn’t be found. Instead I followed a link for Desktop PCs that I found on the right side of the page as it was the closest match that I could find. At this point, I was stuck. The page was dedicated to PCs and didn’t contain any links to network cards beyond the Modems & Networking link on the main navbar.
Next on the list, Macromedia. I wanted to find out about the new Dreamweaver MX. Ignoring the large Flash navbar at the top of the page, Dreamweaver MX is mentioned in three separate places: online forums, news and learn - none of which look like product specific links. My best bet was the news headline, “Macromedia introduces Dreamweaver MX,” which linked to a press release describing the new product. One of the first links in the press release was “Macromedia Dreamweaver MX,” which linked directly to the main Dreamweaver MX product page. So I found what I wanted pretty easily, still without using the navbar.
This was hardly a scientific experiment, but it’s interesting to see how homepages are relying less on primary navigation and more on structured page content. Will this trend continue? Maybe it will depend on what Jakob Nielson says next.
(Thanks GUUUI for the Bohmann article.)
- 8 May 02
- content, navigation, usability, web design
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