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Navigation

Webusers want to find information as fast as possible - but reality seems to be different. A study of  http://pychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/annoyances.htm found, that webusers need e.g. 17 minutes to get the info of a certain airway company, while a phone call would clear the matter in just 3 minutes.

The basic questions of orientation are:

• Where am I, what is coming next? Here dominates still the old tradition, based on book-reading, that one expects the visitors to start from the front- or homepage and to move halfways systematically through the presented documents. Nonsense. The reality on the web is a different one. Most visitors (> 90%) come through a search machine, that brings them onto precisely the page with the key word(s) they are looking for. Many of those pages do not offer the slightes information, where to they belong, in what context they fit.

  • So each single webpage would have to be designed in such a way, that it can serve as homepage.

• From where do I come from? How can I go back? Where do I get an overview? How does this page fit into the whole website? Those questions are to be taken serious, if you want to avoid, that single, unconnected webpages of your website are floating around in the webspace, without real connection to your site, your company and your targets.

• Where do I want to go? Where may I go from here? Well, the first question is probably up to the visitor, but as on the web one often does not know, what there might be, so one does not really know, where to go, this is a chance to lead the visitor to some interesting presentation (Interesting! Do not overlook that word).

The classical homepage, the so called portals, are a great start for computer- and other data-freaks, who do not mind to browse through hunderts of offers to find the wanted one. But the common websurfer wants a quick answer to a question, most often formulated in just one keyword. For him the psychologically ideal size of information is only 5 terms (3 to 8). Less will look poor, more will be discarded as "cluttered".  

The establishment of an "optimal" navigation is made more difficult by the fact, that there are different types of users. There are those that search systematically, and there are those, that just walk around in the web and let themselves be guided. Experienced users want to reach their target quickly and are happy for shortcuts. Webwalkers, sundaybrowsers like to be guided and to get the content offert step by step.

 The most important rule of navigation is the same as for texts. The user wants to know, what he gets when he clicks. Is it an interesting topic? Is it a fast html, a still rather cumbersome pdf, probably with several mb? As in newspapers, the stile of writing should confirm to newspaper-stile, where first the most interesting facts convince the reader to take the effort to really read the text. The school-taught scientific stile, where you first unpack the problem, develop a methodology and come, after lengthy research and discussions to some conclusions ... mostly only, that more research ist needed. This stile is not appropriate for most presentations on the web. But even for scientific presentations, no, especially for scientific presentions of complex matters, the internet is the ideal media.