Re: Splash page and something else.

At 03:40 PM 8/31/98 -0400, Bernie Monette wrote:
>I was wondering what your take is on a navigation style I have seen
>cropping up: essentially many pages have a series of links which would
>lead you back through the site. Like this: home/subsection/this page.
>Microsoft and Macromedia both use it. It seems to offer a nice
>combination of location clues and design. Does it make sense to use this
>sort of low bandwidth navigation at both the top and the bottom of
>pages?

The crusty old curmudgeon who does useit.com recommends use of just such a
thing, and for once I agree with him without reservation. Of course, now
that I'm trying to find it, I can't dig up the specific article. But
essentially, his reasoning went like this---usability studies have shown
that people try to dissect URLs to find what they're looking for. If a user
with just a little clever touch is reading info on web-safe palettes at
www.whatsit.com/tips/design/graphics/palettes/websafe/ , he may infer that
he can get more generalized design tips at www.whatsit.com/tips/design/ ,
so he's apt to try it out and see what he gets. I know *I* do this all the
time---and am often disappointed by what I find, or rather what I don't. So
the thinking goes, if you have a hierarchical pointer to where you are
within a given site, the user gains perspective on what may be found at the
levels upward of his current location in the hierarchy, and hopefully find
what he actually needs faster.

This is also a good argument for use of descriptive directory name
structures. www.whatsit.com/tips/design/graphics/palettes/websafe/ is
pretty easy to interpret, but something like
www.whatsit.com/090598/ref/websafepal/ really isn't. If you have on your
site a navigational hierarchy that says something like whatsit home --> web
development tips --> conceptualization and design considerations --> why
web graphics aren't print graphics --> minimizing file size via careful
palette selection --> preventing palette shifts on the web .... then a user
can easily slide up a few levels to find exactly what he's looking for.

And while we're on the topic of navigable site structure, my own personal
pet peeve is when I do try to dissect a long URL and go back a few
directory levels, and don't get an index (or default) page! Nothing like a
directory listing 4 screens long full of things like "pal.html" and
"grfxinfo.html" and "smsize.html" when I KNOW that information I want is
there somewhere. Even if your content directories are not *intended* to be
viewed as discrete "subsites" of their own, you can bet people will be
trying it anyway.

I, uh, hereby postulate that the phenomena of URL dissection is a side
effect of crappy navigation and of crappy information flow of any given
website, and I speculate that designers could end such a practice ideally
by providing a user more clues as to his location in relation to the entire
site as a cohesive yet subdivided whole. 

(Five out of six isn't bad...)






Michelle L. Kinsey-Clinton
"Is it possible to ever discuss theory, keeping it at the
broad-strokes level, without eventually having to break theory
down into specifics, in order to support one's hypotheses?"
           ---me, quoted by permission, one would assume.

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