The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
Creating a Customer-Friendly Web Environment: Part II
In his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series, the late Douglas Adams offers a simple way to avoid getting lost. "Whenever I'm driving and think I may be lost," he says through one of his main characters, "I simply start following the car in front of me. I may never arrive at my original destination, but I often wind up at the most wonderful and unexpected places."
Mr. Adams was a writer of clever and inventive science fiction stories. It's probably a good thing he wasn't a Web designer. And yet, in reviewing a great many corporate Web sites (e-commerce sites as well as Web marketing and information postings), one is often led to wonder: for whom were these sites designed? The amiable explorer who revels in the thrill of unexpected discovery, or the serious shopper or information seeker who knows what he is seeking and wants to find the shortest route to getting there?
Surfing and Exploring
The answer should be obvious in the question's asking, but that's less commonly the case on the Web than it should be. Indeed, in too many respects, the Web is a victim of the wrong metaphor. Particularly in its early years, the Web was regarded as a venue for "surfing" or randomly exploring--an analogue for the kind of aimless "channel surfing" in which many bored television viewers engage in an effort to see what's on at a specific moment in time.
While such idle exploration sometimes can be enjoyable, for most users, however, "surfing" the Web has all the appeal of "surfing" the Yellow Pages to see who's selling at a particular point in time. Not only are the Yellow Pages (like the Web) fairly static over any short time period, but most users visit them not to explore, but to satisfy a specific need for information. So, too, is it with the Web: most users are seeking either to find a specific bit of information or to purchase a specific product. Even those who are "browsing" are usually doing so with a purpose: for instance, browsing the Amazon site for books about anthropology, or trawling through Google for anti-virus sites or software.
In this sense, the Web is much less like the highly time-centric, push-oriented television model that informed the original "Web surfing" concept, and much more like a mega shopping mall. While there is a good deal of random exploration at any mall, most visitors are there for a purpose; rather than idly "surfing," they tend to head straight for the store where they want to shop or, if they are unfamiliar with the mall, to a store directory. Within individual stores, the process is the same: shoppers are usually looking for a specific product or class of products. Store owners have responded to this need by going to great lengths to make it easy for shoppers to find what they want--for instance, by clearly labeling their merchandise and departments, and by maintaining a relatively consistent store layout over time. In fact, stores that fail to do this do not stay in business for very long.
It's a perspective that more Web site developers could profitably take to heart.
The Imperative of Clear Navigation
In the previous column, we discussed the importance of good Web site design in delivering an exceptional customer experience. And, like store marquees and display windows, good design is vital. It is what attracts the visitor's eye, and helps to create the pleasing visual ambiance that make the site a candidate for prolonged stays and repeat visits. Without good design, sites struggle to get visitors past the front door, much less to keep them on the site for any length of time.
But once inside a site, most visitors find that navigation and information architecture are even more important. A recent survey by New York-based Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research company, asked consumers to identify the most important features of an online service or site. Two-thirds answered, "the ease of navigation." As Jupiter's Anya Sacharow explains, "Navigation is at the center of any Web site experience, a silent partner to the content itself. Users return to sites more regularly [and] are more likely to complete a transactionä based on ease of navigation."
How to imbue a site with easy navigation? A first step, says Philip Holmes, writing in Sales and Marketing Magazine, is that "navigational aids should be designed with customer needs in mind." Jupiter's Mark Mooradian amplifies: "Navigation should be built around user activity patterns rather than around an abstract idea of a hierarchy of information." On a great many sites, unfortunately, just the opposite takes place. Such sites are organized by departments, functions, or other corporate-centric classifications that are irrelevant to the ways in which most people actually search for information, with the customers' information needs and most common activity patterns becoming lost in the process. The customer experience derived from using these ill-informed hierarchies, remarks Sun Microsystems' Jakob Nielsen, is a little like "going to McDonald's and being greeted with, 'Hello, welcome to McDonald's. Would you like to contact our Vice President of Sales?'"
The problems created by these poor navigational architectures are more than theoretical. Forrester Research, an e-business research firm, discovered that, in large part because of poor attention to site usability, inappropriate or unclear navigation, and confusion generated by irrelevant site features, as many as 10% of large-corporation Web sites were in need of a complete six-month tear-down and overhaul, with most others needing repairs requiring from 3 to 26 weeks. The consequences of this sub-optimal site architecture and navigation: a loss of customers and revenue. Notes Forrester's Harvey Manning, "Failure to provide relevant content and helpful functionality is driving away 40% of repeat traffic."
On the other hand, says Mark Mooradian, effectively implemented navigation can promote repeat visits. "The primary benefit of any good navigation is audience and customer retention," he notes. According to Jupiter research, "while navigation does not draw visitors, it does affect whether or not visitors remain on the site and for how long, whether or not they return, and whether they interact with features and functions."
Transparent Navigation
When a consumer visits a large, comprehensive retail store--a Target, say, or a Home Depot--one of the most immediately striking features of such stores is the high ceiling from which clear directional signs are hung, labeled with such departments as "housewares," "electronics," or "garden." Moreover, most stores within a given chain are laid out similarly, if not with exactly duplicate floor plans, at least with identical colors, signage, and general "look and feel." Such stores are an archetype of easy navigation: even if a shopper has never before been to a particular Target, for instance, the shopper can tell in an instant where he or she needs to go.
Not surprisingly, this same principle can be applied to the Web, resulting in a navigational prescription that Jupiter Media Metrix researchers term "transparent navigation," or "the appearance of moving through a site without jumping from place to place." Transparent navigation, explains Jupiter's Anya Sacharow, "is movement through a site where information comes to users" without their having to expend great deal of effort searching for it. As with the first-time Target visitors, Web sites architected with transparent navigation offer "layers of information simultaneously visible and consistently available" from all places within the site. Such navigation makes it easy for site visitors to get "to anywhere, from anywhere," no matter where within the site they happen to be.
While there are several forms of transparent navigation, one of the most functional is that of extended or cascading menus, in which subcategories immediately appear when a user rolls or mouses over a main category, without having to click on the category and wait for a new page to load. Even a user unfamiliar with such a site's architecture can investigate several categories within seconds in order to locate precisely the information he is searching for.
Consider, for example, MSNBC.com's ActiveX-based front page, which the Jupiter researchers describe as "the epitome of transparent navigation." The site's content, they observe, "unfolds through the menu in such a way that users are able to see the entire site without clicking from page to page. ActiveX expands the menu as the cursor rolls over the navigation bar in the left margin. Without clicking, users can see all the subdivisions of content," with several topics unfolding for multiple levels. Such easy and intuitive navigation is one reason that MSNBC has consistently remained the Internet's top general news site for the past several years.
Contrast that experience with the ad-inventory maximizing construct of page "drill downs," in which users must click from page to page to obtain more granular views of information. LookSmart, for example, is an excellent Web directory, with clear category labels and rich, well-organized content. However, users must repeatedly drill down through layers upon layers of directory subcategories (sometimes, six or seven levels deep) before reaching actual site listings--and users who find that they have gone down the wrong path typically must painstakingly retrace their steps to an earlier point before looking elsewhere. Were a retail store or a shopping mall designed in this fashion, one can imagine that most consumers, once visiting, would never return.
The "drill down" navigational architecture survives on the Web only because there are, as yet, so few good alternatives in place. But, with the increasing acceptance and maturity of customer-friendly technologies like ActiveX, Dynamic HTML (DHTML), and Macromedia Flash, the old ways are not likely to survive for more than another year or two. And neither are the sites that employ them.
Principles of Successful Navigation
The concept of transparent navigation applies to the Web what standalone application architects have known for years: maximum usability demands that applications (and, in the same way, Web sites) should be architected with user needs and expectations foremost in mind. Indeed, the cascading menus offered by MSNBC.com are reminiscent of nothing so much as Microsoft's own desktop applications, like Word and Excel--products whose market dominance has been driven, at least in part, by their exceptionally intuitive and easy-to-use navigational systems.
The same user perspective can just as readily be deployed on nearly any Web site, regardless of its specific content, information hierarchies, or technological preferences. Jennifer Fleming, a Boston-based design consultant and author of "Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience," offers 10 key principles for effective, user-centric Web navigation:
1. Navigation should be easily learned. Buyers of complex desktop applications, Fleming notes, will endure steep learning curves because they have invested a considerable amount of money in the program's purchase, and because their job often depends upon their knowing the application. But Web site visitors, who have generally invested nothing and who can go somewhere else in a few clicks, will usually do so if they can't understand a site within a few seconds.
2. Navigation should be consistent. In the same way that retail store chains promote consistency among their various store locations in order to make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for, Web designers should promote consistency in navigation among their site's various sections and pages. In particular, navigation should be placed in the same location throughout the site, use the same color scheme and graphical representations, and adhere to the same basic content architecture. Otherwise, users will have to spend time locating and learning new navigational schema as they move about the site--time that presumably could be better spent absorbing the site's content.
3. Navigation should provide feedback. One of the most frustrating cell phone experiences is continuing to talk long after the connection has been lost; eventually, the lack of feedback from the other party becomes a warning sign that one is no longer being heard. In the same way, unresponsive Web site navigation can cause site visitors to wonder whether their preferences are being noted. Simple rollovers and "mouse overs"--whether resulting in dynamically revealed information or merely a visual highlight--let site users know where they are, and that the connection to the site is still live.
4. Navigation should appear in context. Navigation, says Jennifer Fleming, "should always be available when it's needed, since people shouldn't have to rely on browser features or guesswork to move around." One key rule: navigation should appear on every page--and, as noted above, such navigation should be consistent on every page. If radically different navigation is necessary for a particular section of a site, it is usually better to create a sub-site in a different window rather than to alter the core site's basic navigational architecture, which can create disorientation rather than clarity.
5. Navigation should require an economy of action and time. Because most Web site visitors will be looking for specific pieces of information, they should be able to get to where they are going as quickly as possible--directly from the front page, if possible. This goal can be achieved in two ways. First, the information that users are most likely to want (not that the site owner thinks is most important) should comprise the top levels of the site's information architecture. Second, some form of transparent navigation should be employed so that users can probe the site's content from the front page without having to repeatedly drill down from page to page.
6. Navigation should provide clear visual messages. Notes Fleming: "Interface design is not just about beautifying. It's visual guidance. How you present navigation options is closely tied to how usable they are." For instance, if navigational elements are "difficult to find, look too much like [ordinary] text, look too much like other images, or are otherwise visually confusing, users will have trouble getting around."
7. Navigation should offer alternatives. In addition to creating a clear navigational framework, it is equally important that the navigational elements themselves be readily understood. Unfortunately, many Web designers become so enamored with clever icons that they employ them as navigational aids without explanatory text. That approach may work fine for some visually oriented site users, but most people require verbal indicators as well. Indeed, a good navigational system recognizes that people process information in different ways, and therefore should offer multiple alternatives--graphics, colors, and text, for instance--for orienting visitors to the site.
8. Navigation should offer clear labels. In related fashion, the words used as navigational labels should be clear and unambiguous--not just to frequent site visitors, but to those who are using the site for the first time, and who may view the site from an entirely different perspective from that of the site's designers. Labels like "Who We Are" and "What We Do" may be pedestrian, but they will accurately communicate to nearly all site visitors what lies beneath a mouse click--and that, after all, is one of a navigational system's main purposes.
9. Navigation should be appropriate to the site's purpose. Visitors to Borders.com are usually there to buy books or music, not to read the company's most recent annual report. Therefore, the site's navigation focuses on the company's product lines and other customer-related information. Yet, for some site visitors--investors, Wall Street analysts, and members of the news media, for example--the annual report may be just what they want to see. Therefore, Borders (like many consumer-oriented firms) maintains a separate corporate site (www.bordersgroup.com) whose navigational hierarchy differs significantly from that of its consumer site, and is focused on the likely informational interests of its specific target audience members.
10. Navigation should support users' goals and behaviors. As beneficial as consistent and relatively conventional navigation can be, it usually does not call attention to aspects of a site that may have been recently added or that may be particularly worthy of note to individual visitors. Therefore, effective site navigational architectures set aside portions of the site for highlights or features that change over time, such as weekly feature story links that appear in consistent and predictable locations but whose specific content change from week to week. Some sites go even further, personalizing content within feature areas. Most notable among them, perhaps, is Amazon, which provides a recommendation area on its front page that is consistently designed and located, but whose content varies according to visitors' previous purchases and site activity.
The Customer Experience
Like Web site design itself, the creation of an effective navigational structure is not a cookie-cutter exercise. Navigational standards and technologies are still evolving, and probably will continue to do so for the immediate future. Too, the same navigational constructs that work on one site may be inappropriate or less than optimal for another. In this changing environment, Jennifer Fleming's counsel is worth heeding. The answer to the navigational challenge, she says, lies "in understanding not [just] which navigation systems work, but why." Knowing this much--being able to think like the site's target users--may offer the shortest navigational route to creating an exceptionally customer-friendly Web environment.
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