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by Ron Richards, President, ResultsLab |
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Link Architecture: Central issues in navigation design. |
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The many roles of links, and their helpers < Best to read this first |
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Link strategies and examples < Below on this page |
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Link Strategies and Examples |
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Each section below discusses one of the site architect’s most essential issues concerning link development and navigation structure. Of course, the principles you’re about to read need to be applied in a way that dovetails with the purpose and style of your site. Nevertheless , I thought it would be useful if I stuck my neck out and gave an example of the principles in action. So, at the end of each section below, I’ll use some aspect of the site you’re in right now -- www.resultslab.com -- as an example of how I attempted to apply various principles, while transcending the many binds inherent in even a relatively simple site like this. The best balance between Site designers who choose maximum user options and “freedom” are making a big mistake, as we’ll see by a few brief looks at other “learning-oriented-media” of the past. In the 1960’s Programmed Learning was invented by my mentor, Francis Mechner, and by B.F. Skinner. People thought the new “Education Industry” was going to be one of the biggest revolutions ever. I was in the thick of it, launching what became under me and still is today the largest selling training program in history, a programmed learning course called “Professional Selling Skills.” PSS was an early use of not only programmed learning but also role-play training, and it grew to embody multimedia simulations. In that era, there was a battle to the death between two approaches to presenting information to learners -- the linear programs, and the branching ones. There’s a similar issue now about whether to have lots of links pointing every which way in a matrix of destinations, vs. giving the Web site visitor a lot of guidance -- in the extreme giving them a virtual controlled presentation. In the super-extreme, some site areas have the visitor simply click at the bottom of each page on the “next page” icon -- sometimes for dozens of pages. Advocates of branching argued that it allowed learners to follow their own interest (on the premise that such branching would increase motivation and reinforcement). They also argued that if someone was lost, they could go on a side trip that would give them clarification. Despite strong advocates and some brilliant attempts, the branching approach to programmed learning died, and here’s why. We eventually realized it was a default on the part of the designer to let the learner get lost -- to fail to design a sequence that a wide range of people could follow. And we found that it was often more important to present information in a sequence designed for maximum comprehension, building one prerequisite concept on top of another. (Doesn’t your site have some “prerequisite” concepts?) We found that if we did enough user testing and revision, we could create linear learning sequences that a wide range of people could fly through with full comprehension, with only 5% errors when they were tested along the way. We found we could make the sequences fascinating, and that people would spend a long time in high involvement. Every Web site that isn’t primarily a database lookup oriented site (like Amazon.com) can be viewed as having both learning and persuasion goals. Why default on everything you ever learned about how to control the sequence of concepts just because the Web is a medium that allows total jumping around? For example, for many sites that sell expensive things, you might want visitors to understand a bit about your company’s approach, and your products, before they jump to your prices. And you might want to help them learn some of the standards for evaluating your product category before they jump to the features of your products. I find that “resetting the standard” is one of the most powerful principles in all of marketing. Also, in a site of any size, you would be well served to introduce certain ideas and news on your top pages before giving people a link to the details -- the approach every newspaper and magazine uses with cover stories. Therefore, the site architect’s goal should be to strike a proper balance between freedom and guidance -- in terms of how the links are presented, sequenced and chunked. We need to guide them in their choices to a degree that depends on the site. We can still give them plenty of links, but our guidance will keep them on the route that’s most in their interest and ours -- without any sense of holding them back or constraining them. After all, hyper-viewing has been around for hundreds of years, in the form of tables of contents and indexes. True, with those print tools you can’t click and jump, but you can use them to guide your sequence. With a little bit of effort you get to the destination. Yet tables of contents are little used by most readers. I don’t think it’s just the effort of looking up pages that stops them from being heavily used, given how valuable they are. I think they don’t get used because they’re dull. They rarely contain grabber, evocative language. You might say they default on containing such language. This should put us on notice as Web architects to be careful in risking link lists that are dull lists of destinations. Even further back in history, back to cave-person graphic design, there was hyper-viewing in the form of the eye jumping from one area of a cave-wall painting to another -- based on the individual’s interest. Nowadays, in print, this is the issue of how to use pictures, headlines, subheads, sidebars, slogans and other devices to guide eye-flow. In fact, in a brochure or other printed document, it is well known that people will hyper-view by jumping amongst the pages to find things that interest them, reading out of order and skipping things. Just because your stimuli are now on the Web, why default on eye-control and guidance issues, by linking helter-skelter. All those non-links that surround the jump points, and guide interest, are just as important as they ever were -- in fact more so because there’s more potential to lose the hyper viewer. ResultsLab site as an example of In this site notice that key strategic content is presented in a top master border that repeats on each page, provides positioning, claims, and goals -- and reminds the reader that they’re still in the ResultsLab site. Instead of putting all the What Clients Say content in a sub-section, a key case story is presented as a feature story on the “cover” much as a magazine would do. Similarly, a key learning gift, the Moments of Truth series of pages is showcased on the right side of the home page. All these decisions put linear presentation considerations temporarily ahead of logical organization considerations, and ahead of hyper Webbing. The 2.5 Fold Initial Gains article is meant to dominate and pull readership, yet the reader is given access to the whole site via what is essentially a plain HTML site map on the right side of the home page -- a map that lets them know as soon as they enter the site where they can always find color changing cues to what they’ve followed. Meanwhile, the extensive use of navigation buttons is delayed until you are at the next level of the site. Chunking We’ve already discussed chunking issues, now let’s look at our example. ResultsLab site as an example of Our three Moments of Truth pages demonstrate the chunking issue. On the one hand, the three pages could have been chunked up and become one page. The argument for that would have been that the content is middle-range linear, with each perspective’s insights building on top of the prior one. But I decided, given that each of the three areas is heavily illustrated with memory-aid pictures, that if I merged the three pages it would be far too long of a download. I wanted each page’s pictures to be present soon after the visitor started reading the page. On the other hand, each of the three areas could have been chunked down to a separate page for every one of the approximately 30 principles, with all the principles listed as links at the opening. But I decided I wanted the principles to be easily printed, and that chunking links down to the principles level would require too many PRINT actions for visitors, and thus deny them the easy take-away value. It would also encourage their reading out of order, which I thought was not in their interest. The price I paid for the three-section architecture is that I had to make, and keep, that relationship clear by guidance at various places in the site -- which brings us to the next link-development issue Link-Clusters that guide visitors When a content area is clustered into several pages, the difficult problem emerges of how to relate those pages in the visitor’s mind -- to expose the structure, and encourage them to move between the related areas without getting lost. If you achieve that, the visitors will have the maximum opportunity to eventually gather the related content. ResultsLab site as an example of Again, the three Moments of Truth pages are a good example of an attempt to solve this problem. Notice the sidebar I developed that shows at a glance that there are three related areas, that they are related in a cause-and-effect sequence, and that provides an arrow marker to help the reader keep track of where they are in the series of three pages. That sidebar is on the first screen in each Moments of Truth area. I decided to put the sidebar at the end of each Moments of Truth page as well. I risked that it might be overkill, and would irritate more than guide -- but when in doubt I’d rather provide more navigation help than less. To introduce the three Moments of Truth pages and their relationship, the sidebar is also prominent on the first screen of the home page, as part of the hybrid “site map.” Headings & graphics that sell the link cluster A cluster of related links, where you’d like the visitor to follow many of the links, is potentiated by non-link headings and graphics that sell the value of the cluster. Everything we say about Grabber Development is relevant to this task. The non-link language, and the link language should collaborate to set clear visitor expectations that will be fulfilled, not betrayed, by clicking. And the language should entice the visitor -- maximizing the visitor’s breadth and depth of appropriate exploration. This maximizes value gathering for the visitor, message delivery for the site owner, and impressions for the site’s advertisers. ResultsLab site as an example of The Moments of Truth sidebar we’ve been discussing has a grabber headline intended to signal the value of the three pages while it helps in comprehension of what the series is. It focuses on what the content is (“Moments of Truth for 3 kinds of people”), says who can benefit (“and what developers can do...for publishers and advertisers”), and what the value is beyond just clarifying key moments (“multiply results”). To aid comprehension and sell the visitor on reading the series in sequence, there is an arrow that points to the sequence of concepts and the ideal reading sequence (“Cause & Effect”). Encouraging visitors to read the series in sequence is in their interest since it presents concepts that build on each other to some degree. Two things help them know where they’ve been and where they are: The three links change color, and the arrow at the right of the sidebar help then know which page they’re on now. Links and navigation buttons to promote multiple levels I like to imagine the reader wondering, in every page, what pages he wants to revisit that he may have passed. Such pages may be parents, children, or siblings of the current page. Most sites keep reminding the reader of the major areas of the site, but few give the reader access to two or three levels on each page. ResultsLab site as an example of The navigation buttons on the right usually show the home page and every page under it, the siblings and cousins of the current page, and the children of the current page. I attempted to organize these three arrays of buttons in separate clusters to aid comprehension. The buttons carry grabber text and that constrains how small the buttons can be, and sets up a tradeoff. If we are to have multiple arrays of buttons, and each needs to be big enough to carry grabbers, the buttons will have to extend below the first screen. The visitor will have to scroll to see some of the navigation buttons. The scrolling issue doesn’t come up at the bottom of the page, where the same array of navigation choices are given as color-changing plain HTML links. Locations, formats, and repetitions of links On each page, we need to decide what mixtures of links to use: image maps, nav buttons, plain HTML link clusters/lists, and in-text link phrases. Often all of them appear on the same page. As we’ve already discussed, each competes with the others, setting up a grueling or pleasurable set of binds, depending on your thirst for high challenge. The link decisions interact with the decisions as to balance between graphics and text. And for each link, there is the issue of how long a grabber to make the link language, and how much support to give the link clusters by using non-link subheads and graphics. Although research supports using a “click here” cue in a banner ad, I rarely use it within content pages. ResultsLab site as an example of This site has few links within the flow of each page, and many in the surrounding navigation areas. The within-flow links, for example in the flow of the Moments of Truth pages, take a great risk of losing the reader. If readers stay on the main path within each Moments of Truth page, they will find all the links they passed amply expressed in the navigation bars on the right and in the footers, hopefully causing an “Oh yeah, I meant to go there” reaction. On the other hand, readers might keep jumping out of the Moments of Truth flow to get the goodies which the interspersed grabber links tell them about. In that case, hopefully the repeating sidebar we already discussed will coax them back into the Moments of Truth pages, all the while keeping them clear about where they’ve been and where they want to go. I believe that links should be repeated elsewhere in proportion to how vital the content is to the reader. Despite all attempts to signal value in the link-language grabber, the reader may not realize just how revealing it would be if they went there. For example, I considered the lead article on 2.5 Initial Gains for NetscapeWorld such a revealing case story that I linked to it from many places throughout the site -- even though I’d already given it top prominence by putting the whole article on the home page, and an animated GIF on the first screen to introduce it. Links to the same page I sometimes sit next to users, watch what they do, and interview them about what’s going on in their minds. This has convinced me that putting links to targets on the same page is a technique fraught with dangers. The user gets lost, begins to notice things are repeating, and bails out of the page or site in frustration. The one use of such links that seems to not confuse is where a page starts (on the first screen) with a list of links that all lead to content down that same page. This is very common in FAQ pages, lists of phone numbers, or other highly related data. The opening list serves as a “chapter” table of contents, and this can be made clear to the visitor. A great advantage of keeping all those highly-related destinations on the same page is the visitor’s ability to print the whole shebang with one click, while retaining their ability to jump to just the piece that applies to them. ResultsLab site as an example of I’m wary enough of this technique to have not used it at all in this site. The one application for it that I like -- a collection of randomly accessible information on one page -- didn’t apply here. Competition among links Let’s expand on the metaphor of a smorgasbord table full of one’s favorite delights, to be visited for multiple helpings. If you run that restaurant, in order to be sure people are satisfied and return again, you want the food to taste as good as it looks. The grabber language had better match the experience that follows. What about all those juicy, grabbing links that compete for attention? As an architect, might we have created too much of a good thing, undercutting some links by setting up grabbing competitors? Well, at a great smorgasbord did you ever resent that you had to make choices? I doubt it. Some of the chefs might be frustrated that some people don’t eat the specific dishes they made. But they’ll get over it when they see the whole restaurant thrive, resulting in the small fraction who eat the specific dishes they prepared turn into a large number of people. We can be pretty sure that if you find your very favorite dishes, see an abundance of favorites, and then find them satisfying -- you are likely to eat more total food than you otherwise would have. For a Web site, this means more total communication on behalf of the site’s information goals, and more impressions for advertisers. Therefore, a competition amongst link grabbers and the non-link grabbers that support links is healthy for both the visitor and the site. The pageview stats will tell you which destinations had that golden combination of inherent value, made visible by great grabbers. Sites that can track the prior URL that led to the pageviews can learn a lot about which of the several grabbers that led to the same destination worked best. After all, each link that points to a destination page may have different language, and different surrounding content and graphics that supported the link and helped make it a launching pad toward the destination. ResultsLab site as an example of As I already discussed, the three Moments of Truth pages are full of within-text cross links to articles that offer a deeper understanding of that Moment of Truth. For example, the page you’re now reading was cross linked in the Visitors Moment of Truth page, so you may have come here as a sidetrack from your reading of Moments of Truth. Hopefully, many things will immunize the site against the competing-link problem -- prompting you to return and finish Moments of Truth. Prompts include: (1) the repeated sidebars making the structure clear, and re-promoting the importance of Moments of Truth; (2) your clarity that this page’s content is presenting a more detailed level of architecture and design issues, and your knowledge that there’s more higher-level strategy to be gained, and (3) seeing the navigation buttons and footer bars that remind you on every page of the Moments of Truth section that you left. Destination-arrival confirmation At an airport, did you ever make your way through the passageways to the plane, get on, and then ask the attendant (or person sitting next to you) “Is this the flight to San Francisco?” Of course, in that situation the cost of making a mistake is high, whereas following a link and feeling lost is only a frustration. But visitor confusion and frustration can be very detrimental to the site’s goals. You don’t want them bailing out and failing to get the desired information, with your site failing to generate the impressions. Also you don’t want them to generalize (consciously or unconsciously) that if your site gets them lost they may repeat the experience over and over -- not only within your site but later if they became your user, customer, or subscriber. Therefore, every page should start with an element that confirms where the visitor has arrived. “Ah, I’m still in the same site, and this is the page I wanted.” And the wording of the arrival confirmation should be very close to the wording of the link that sent them there -- despite temptations to have more variety and creativity by varying the wording significantly. A further reason for arrival confirmation is that people may reach a page of your site because someone gave them the URL of that side-door page, or because they were referred to it by a search-engine listing (if you didn’t use robots.txt to block the listing of some of your crawled pages). In fact, someone may have given them a printout. The printout should make clear what site, and page, the printout came from -- more than just the URL in the corner of the page. ResultsLab site as an example of In this site, every page other than the home page starts with a banner that confirms the subject of the page, and often there is a title under the banner to further amplify and clarify. In the navigation buttons on the right, the one corresponding to the page you’re on has a different look. Since many people won’t notice that, it should not be relied on for primary confirmation of arrival. On the home page, I didn’t want to have a banner saying “Home” for several reasons. First, I wanted the graph and the heading under it to show on the first screen -- even on a 9” notebook. A “Home” banner would have pushed my vital grabber content off the first screen. Secondly, Banners should be grabbers, and “home” doesn’t have a grabber quality. Third, I felt the reader would realize they were at home by the right-column “Home Page Site Guide Below Shows All Pages.” To make sure people know they’re still in the ResultsLab site, our name, slogan, thumbs-up symbol, and the goals of the site appear in the top master border of every page. Prominent location for links Since the most prominent site real estate is scarce and precious, some of the most strategic decisions are what to put on the home page, what to put on the first screen of each page, and what to put on the left side of screens. Unfortunately, if first screens are dense with links, you suppress scrolling. You can even cause visitors to drill through many levels of links before every seeing your core content that was on the bottom screens of pages they left. For many sites, it’s in your and the visitors interest for them to get an overview before navigating. In one site I created, I had no links showing until the bottom of the home page. Later, I found an article that gave an amazing overview of how the site-owner caused history making results for their client. So I put a sidebar about the article and a link to the article in the upper right hand corner of the home page. Given the power of that article, I felt it would serve almost as a bridge page, or anteroom that would surely make the visitor want to click right back to the top of the home page. ResultsLab site as an example of This site home page has no links down the left, where the key article about 2.5 Fold Initial Gains for NetscapeWorld appears. But the entire site map is on the right -- competing with the article. Here we see what seems to be an extreme competition between content and navigation. In fact, the site-map’s links and sidebars are much more than navigation, because they contain grabber language. And they are supported by even more grabbing non-link headings. What you see is not just a site map, but a true Site Guide. The Guide’s language implies a lot about ResultsLab, and communicates a lot about the value of the site -- both of which hopefully serve to have visitors say, “Wow; I’ve discovered something valuable; I’m going to spend some time here!” If I had my druthers, I’d prefer that people read the article down the left, then scroll back up to the map on the right to begin their exploration. For those who choose to navigate first, my hope is that the graph and it’s headlines -- that they surely saw as the home page loaded -- are so strong that they will return later to read the article. Just in case, that key article is also linked from several places in the site. So, hopefully this particular competition between content and links has been immunized against losing the visitor. What was your experience? Whereas most sites put navigation buttons on the left, I choose in this case to put them on the right -- to subordinate them in terms of eye flow. I wanted to reserve the first-seen upper left for my primary grabbers. My first screens always contain grabbers, and on many pages the first screen highlights the sidebar introducing and clarifying pages that relate to or are continuations of the current page.. Plain-text, color-changing navigation strips along page bottoms are not there because some people browse without pictures showing -- which always seem to be given as the reason for plain text navigation strips. I assumed for my target audience, virtually all will want to see pictures, and have the computing power and bandwidth to do so. Therefore, those bottom navigation strips are for two other reasons: (1) to give people an easy way, and a prompt, to reach other pages at the end of each page, and (2) to give them another place where they can see which links remain to be followed, via color change. Page break control on printouts Most site developers ignore how things will look on printouts, but they shouldn’t. For business, professional and technical audiences, often the prime prospect will prefer to read from printouts. Often they want printouts for their files. And in many cases, the job of finding the site and printing key pages is delegated to an assistant, researcher, or librarian -- with the target reader never seeing anything but the printouts. Since current HTML doesn’t allow the designer to choose where page breaks go, there is high risk of awkward page breaks. The old Navigator and Explorer 3.0 browsers even split a picture in half at page breaks. A brute force solution is to divide your content into things that can print on one 8 1/2 x 11 page. This would require breaking even highly related content into many pages, each with a separate link. The visitor who wants to print would have to click on PRINT a dozen times to get a long article -- which is more likely to result in the article not getting printed at all. A great solution would be a meta-tag and browser feature that would enable one to click on a link that said “Print the following 7 links,” and would then go ahead and do so. (I’ve often fantasized a feature that allowed “Print the whole site to level 3,” or “Print this level and all it’s children.” You get the idea.) Some sites copy related pages into one big page and let you click a “Print Entire Article” link. For example, ZDNet has this feature. I’ve tried to find more elegant ways to control page breaks on printouts, and to some extent it can be done through the use of tables. That’s because some browsers are loath to break a table in half if the whole table can fit on one page, and the following table on the next page. ResultsLab site as an example of Try printing any of the Moments of Truth pages from an Internet Explorer browser. You’ll find (I hope) that most pages contain only one topic, with a picture on the left and text on the right. To achieve that, I used tables, and made sure that each topic’s text was short enough to fit one printout page. The first topic in each “chapter” had to be even shorter, to allow room for the header information as well. It’s a lot of work, but I think it’s worth it. Sometimes controlling the look on various browsers even requires the designer to work around bugs. I discovered that all Internet Explorer 3.x browsers created printouts with all the vertical spacing between objects eliminated on the printout even though it looks OK on the screen. When lots of people had Explorer 3.x browsers, I created spacers (hundreds of them) to hold the vertical elements apart on printouts. For the technically inclined, the solution was a tiny table with a one-pixel transparent GIF in it. I’d insert the little table where I wanted space and shape its vertical size to the needed space. That’s no longer needed. Links that cross sell Many sites have only links that guide visitors down a tree that looks like a conventional organization chart. Other sites have links everywhere offering to take the visitor up or down the tree, or horizontally to siblings and cousins -- a complex link-matrix approach. For most sites, both the rigid hierarchical approach and the linkmania approach are mistakes. The best architecture does just the right amount of cross selling -- where links refer to a small number of highly related pages. For example, an innovation at many online technical magazines has been to provide at the end of articles a cluster of links to related resources and articles. This is in addition to any links to related resources that appear within the article. Effective and ethical “cross selling” is always in the interest of the “prospect.” And the links had better be good ones, so the visitor is reinforced, and returns. Again, every link competes with current content and other links. Make those choices carefully, but when you decide to cross link, make the link a real grabber. ResultsLab’s site as an example of The best example in this site is the cross links in virtually every topic within each of the three Moments of Truth pages. The criteria is simple: Serve the visitor. Moments of Truth is conceptually a middle-level piece, contributing a conceptual organization of the Developer’s decisions and results opportunities. It also provides many of the key decision variables, and offers a good deal of advice. But to get more detailed advice on each of those strategic matters, the visitor is cross linked to various other pages. For example, The Many Roles of Links & Their Helpers leads to the page you’re now reading. Hopefully, the reader who jumped to a more detailed page will go back and proceed through the other Moments of Truth. And as we’ve discussed, many prompts (such as the sidebars about Moments of Truth) will guide her. The punch line Link development issues are an inescapable challenge, riddled with binds, tradeoffs and opportunities. And linking issues interact heavily with issues of grabber development and site organization structure. Also, the solutions depend heavily on the site’s purposes. Links, and the non-links that support the links, can help or hurt a lot. And purging something that’s attenuated results by a factor of .5x is as powerful as finding a missed bet that can multiply results by 2x. In fact, the dozens of factors discussed above are each capable of a significant impact on results. Remember the concepts in The Multiplier Principle, including the idea that finding six factors that each improves results by a multiple of 1.3x, achieves a 5x combined amplifier. That’s why the visitors’ experiences around navigation and links is one of the most important Moments of Truth of all. As we’ve seen, developers can do a lot in the area of link strategy to multiply site results. |
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Link Architecture: Central issue in navigation design. |
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The many roles of links, and their helpers < Best to read this first |
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Link strategies and examples < Above on this page |
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Copyright © ResultsLab. All rights reserved. |
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