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Information Design
Next, you will need generous amounts of organization and clarity in your site. Unless your site is supposed to be difficult to navigate, unclear in purpose, and curiously defined-and some sites creating interesting experiences might possibly be-your site better be well-defined, easy to navigate, and help your audience understand what it-and you-is all about it.
To begin, map out everything you have to present: every piece of content you envision and every interaction. Next, mix well and separate into different arrangements until you find one that is more successful than others in meeting your objectives. This may take some time and you shouldn't try to skip this step. Leave enough time to experiment with organizations and by all means, stay away from metaphors. Nothing confuses audiences more than trying to navigate a site based around a poorly matched and ridiculously implemented analogy that is fundamentally incapable of applying to interactive media. If your metaphor cannot gracefully deal with abstract actions (like hyperlinks, perhaps?) then shoot it in the head and put everyone out of their potential misery early.
Navigation is more than merely telling people where they can go. It is the artful setting of context that allows people to know what to expect, what to do, what they can do, and even, to some extent, how to do it. This is called a cognitive model and represents everything people understand and remember about your site when it isn't actually in front of them. Think about showing up at an exotic restaurant without knowing anything about the cuisine. What should you wear? How do you order? How do you pronounce it? What's good? Where's the bathroom? And what's it all going to cost? If your audience has to ask too many tough questions about what they are to do and where they can go within your site, you can bet they won't stay around for long. I would bet that you won't be available online to help them either, so your site should provide this as well.
Be sure that the navigation in your site allows your audience easy access to the breadth and depth of your site. Don't require them to return to the homepage every time they need to backtrack or access a different portion of your site. The bigger and more varied your site, the more important this is.
Great sites that are easy (and clear) to navigate and understand are not numerous, but they are, thankfully, becoming more common. The amount of content and interaction at your site is no excuse for a poorly organized one. While Pathfinder will retort that they just have too much to say, others know that they are just trying to say too much-and in a confusing way.
Elements of good navigation include giving your audience the ability to navigate in many ways. Can they get around without going to a "map" or back to the home page? Can they distinguish how deep they are in a site and in which section (called signposting)? Can they backtrack up the organization gracefully to any point between them and the homepage? Can they tell what they can expect in a section before they even click to get there? If not, your site's organization is still half-baked and needs more time in the oven before it's ready. You need to spend more time experimenting with possibilities or need to hire someone who can help you see possibilities where you can't. This would be an information designer and there are actually a few around these days. Get on the Net, go to hotbot and do a search for "information design" if you don't know how else to find one. Next, listen to them when they tell you that you're approaching your site too conventionally. After all, you don't really want to serve up the same dull meal everyone else is, do you? This medium is far to young to have established the best ways to do anything.
Now, don't confuse a site's organization, its information design, with the representation of its organization or its visual design. How a site looks is important, but the representation is ultimately not as important as its organization. Also, don't try to rush this important process. This is as important a step as chopping and preparing ingredients before you start combining them. It may not be glamorous and it may not look like you're getting anywhere, but you are laying the groundwork for the future of your site. Good meals do not simply get thrown together. They are the result of careful planning.
Lastly, don't organize too much. I know, I know, this sounds contradictory. Skip to the end to read a bit about interactivity or just try to remember that what you are creating is an experience that plays-out over time. It is always linear in your customer's experience. Everything may not be best presented in neatly ordered rows and columns. The power and magic of your site's experience may be lost when everything is clearly relegated to its own orderly section of the site. Consider that, perhaps, having a page of testimonials isn't as good a sell (since most people won't go there anyway) as interspersing them around an entire section of the site so that they pepper the mix of content. This is sometimes a better way of handling less essential content, giving it more flavor overall.
Note: for more on interaction design, see the vivid insight piece, Unified Field Theory of Design
To summarize: Examples:
- Successful sites are clearly organized and easy to navigate.
- Successful sites have a clear cognitive model that describes the organization. This may or may not be a metaphor (and probably isn't).
- Successful sites should make it clear where you are and where you can go, flattening hierarchies and reducing navigational steps.
- Don't organize the life out of your site.
Amazon Online Bookstore
vivid studios
Adam CardonWhat not to do:
Interface Hall of ShameResources:
Graphical User Interface Gallery
Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide
Information Architecture Guide
HCI Index: Table of Contents
The SIGCHI Bulletin
InformationDesign.org
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Copyright 1994 Nathan Shedroff
