Tag Archives: navigation
We all know how important navigation is on a website. In fact, the core to any effective site is making sure visitors can find what they are looking for, and find it quickly.
Whether they come to search for products, services, or simply contact information, the reality is that if your customers can’t find what they came for, they leave. If that happens, all your hard work to develop a website was in vain.
Over the years web developers have finessed and improved navigation systems and continue to make advancements.
We’ve been following three new navigational trends that we think will change the way the industry traditionally builds navigation systems and how users interact with them.
Here’s what’s on our radar:
Megamenus
Example: www.festoolusa.com
These are becoming more and more common. Instead of having to click several navigation items to find deeper content, Megamenus bring all the content right up front. When users click on a primary navigation item it expands in-page to show deeper content options along with corresponding visual details and information. Users are able to quickly and easily absorb the information and identify different categories without ever leaving the home page. Megamenus essentially solve the problem of limited space on the home page and provide more room for content, from information, to images, to prices.
Clickless Navigation
Example: www.dontclick.it
Amazingly, users can now navigate an entire site without ever having to click their mouse. This new and exciting way to interact with content has a major ‘cool factor,’ too. So what replaces the click? By moving your mouse over a navigation item, you trigger the next level of information to appear. It’s simple to use but a bit of a challenge to stop your natural tendency to click your mouse all the time. The one downside is that currently Clickless Navigation does not meet the W3Cs accessibility standards, which ensure websites support people with disabilities.
Visual/Spatial Navigation
Example: www.whitevoid.com/portfolio.html
Imagine a website where the primary and secondary navigation (typically found at the top and side of a site) are completely eliminated. In their place you’ll see visual icons that act as a means to navigate through products and/or experiences. Once you click an icon a new layer of icon options and deeper content appear, however, the previous icons are still exposed in the background. All the icon layers remain accessible on your screen page, making it easy to find your way around the complete site. This style of navigation is highly product-centric and quite often doesn’t need Flash. But it’s a significant break in current standards, which means it could take users a significant time to accept it.
So what do these trends mean to you?
Navigation as we know it is changing but it’s still too early to determine whether Clickless or Visual will be adopted by users to become viable, commercial options. Because both are big shifts from how average users navigate websites, it will take time for them to understand and become comfortable with these new systems. Megamenus, on the other hand, are gaining traction with businesses and consumers alike due to their simplicity and ease-of-use.
According to ABI Research, people spent approximately $1.6 billion via m-commerce last year. Consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones for financial transactions and there is no question that the opportunity is huge. But what is the best way to go about it? If you’ve surfed the mobile web, you’ve undoubtedly encountered some pretty terrible experiences.
So we set out to identify the best practices that make a mobile experience extraordinary. Why are sites such as m.espn, m.google, mobile.yelp, bbc.co.uk/mobile, mobile.nytimes, iphone.ebay, m.facebook so effective? What makes them almost as indispensable as our mobile phones themselves?
With such a diverse client roster, we’ve created mobile sites for retail, travel, banking and fashion. Though each client had distinct needs and business challenges to solve, clear patterns emerged and this post synthesizes our POV on the best ways to craft a mobile site experience.
The Insights
We took a look at how Google breaks down mobile users into 3 behavior groups: (A) Repetitive Now, (B) Bored Now and (C) Urgent Now. We outlined their similarities and differences. We also looked at how consumers use mobile for multi-channel retail. Here are some shared behaviors we uncovered:
- People usually have a goal.
- They’re doing something in real time.
- They’re looking for seamless experiences.
- They’re comfortable shopping online.
The problem is that most mobile experiences fail to deliver on these essential needs, especially for consumers on the go. We’ve outlined a toolkit of mobile best practices to ensure that your mobile site delivers the value that consumers have come to expect.
Click Here for our 8 Best Practices in creating mobile sites
