Designing a navigation scheme is one of the most challenging work in usability work. TG got a chance to work with a project team to explore the possibility of revamping a main navigation mechanism in an information-rich site.

The task is difficult since there’s no document to trace back its history and the reasoning behind the set-up. As the site has been evolving and growing bigger and bigger day after day, TG finds the site map hardly updated. To be more exact, it can’t be updated.

“Card Sorting” gives insight

TG and the team decided to go for “Card Sorting” approach and borrowed some ideas from Donna Maurer and Yodd Warfel. They are specialist in card sorting and wrote an article in 2004. The article is a great help in understanding the concept, addressing the shortcoming of sites which fail to answer users’ queries. 

cart sorting

In the meantime,  TG also invited a team of expert and stakeholders to participate in the “Expert Review” in order to get a better understanding of users’ requirements. Certainly, it’s not as good as conducting real users study. Yet It provided some insight on how these people think from their customers’ perspective.

Jakob Nielsen’s findings came just in time!

It was yesterday TG open up an email from useit.com, which talks about how right-justified navigation menus would impede scannability. 

 

The menu design guidelines are thus clear, at least for vertical menus:

 

  • Left-justify the menu, so that the user’s eyes can move in a straight line and don’t have to re-acquire the beginning of each new line.
  • Start each menu item with the one or two most information-carrying words.
  • Avoid using the same few words to start list items, because doing so makes them harder to scan.

 

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