The User Controls Navigation - Page 19

In traditional user interface design, the designer can control where the user can go when. You can gray out menu options that are not applicable in the current state, and you can throw up a modal dialog box that takes over the computer until the user has answered the question. On the Web, however, the user fundamentally controls his or her navigation through the pages. Users can take paths that were never intended by the designer. For example, they can jump straight into the guts of a site from a search engine without ever going through the home page. Users also control their own bookmark menu and can use it to create a customized interface to a site.

Web designers need to accommodate and support user-controlled navigation. Sometimes you can force users through set paths and prevent them from linking to certain pages, but sites that do so feel harsh and dominating. It is better to design for freedom of movement and flexible navigation that supports many different ways of moving through a site. Get over it. The user holds the mouse, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Users always request easy ways of comparing products or other items discussed on a site. As long as information is restricted to individual product pages, it is hard for users to form an overview of the space and to understand where they should go. A comparison table is a nice way to reduce the amount of navigation and allow users to go straight to the one or two products they are really interested in.

Dynamic comparison tables are a great way to enhance user control over a large and complex information space. By allowing users to list side by side the exact cars they are thinking of buying, the site can even highlight the most important differences or features that a buyer should pay attention to when contemplating these cars. I don't think I would have highlighted passenger-side airbags when comparing two cars that both have this feature.

Also, a traditional application is an enclosed user interface experience. Although window systems allow application-switching and make multiple applications visible simultaneously, the user is fundamentally "in" a single application at any given time, and only that application's commands and interaction conventions are active. Users spend relatively long periods of time in each application and become familiar with its features and design.

On the Web, users move between sites at a rapid pace, and the borders between different designs (sites) are fluid. It is rare for users to spend more than a few minutes at a time at any given site, and users' navigation frequently takes them from site to site to site as they follow the hyperlinks. Because of this rapid movement, users feel that they are using the Web as a whole rather than any specific site. Users don't want to read any manuals or help information for individual sites, but they do demand the ability to use a site on the basis of the web conventions they have picked up as an aggregate of their experience using other sites. In usability studies, users complain bitterly whenever they are exposed to sites with overly divergent ways of doing things. In other words, the Web as a whole has become a genre, and each site is interpreted relative to the rules of the genre.

Traditional GUIs are also part of a whole, of course, and it is advisable to follow the vendor's design style guide because in the balance between individual design and the whole, the scale tips in favor of the whole for web designs. At the same time, we don't have any established web design style guide that can dictate how designers should use their interface vocabulary to build sites that fit this whole. I am a strong proponent of getting an official set of web design conventions; but as long as we don't have one, my advice to web designers is to design to fit in and to acknowledge that your site is not the center of the users' universe. Users are going to move between sites, and we have to make it easy for them to use each new site as they go.

Design Creationism Versus Design Darwinism

With traditional GUIs we had the luxury of an initial phase of slow research and development at leading companies. Many years passed between the invention of ideas such as windows, menus, and icons, and the introduction of mass-market products. Much in-house experimentation was done by responsible user interface experts like the many researchers at Xerox PARC and Bruce Tognazzini at Apple. As a result, bad ideas were rejected, and good ideas were codified into guidelines before any GUIs were inflicted upon the average computer user. A GUI style guide was a carefully coordinated creation where the best ideas reinforced each other to form a pleasing and usable whole. In contrast, the Web is developing as we speak, and experiments happen on the open Internet with us all as test subjects-not in a videotaped usability lab. The result is a much harsher Design Darwinism, where ideas crash and burn in public. Eventually, the best design ideas will survive and bad ones will decline because users will abandon poorly designed sites.

Breadth Versus Depth: Still More Examples - Page 18
Designing Web Usability
Help Users Manage Large Amounts of Information - Page 20