Navigation blindness

Many development teams put enormous amount of effort and time into the navigation process. With a good eye on the user goals, but what if the user ignores the whole navigation structure and the tools?

Today we see advanced but simple navigation with the goal to lead the user directly to its goal. A large amount of links to the main sections and all the "normal" links such as home, contact, about. But how relevant are these to the goal of the user? Most the time a visitor totally fixated with his goal of finding something and in this process he automatically ignores not relevant things such as banner-ads, animations and graphic diversions. Jakob Nielsen told us that there is no need to link to all sections from each and every page on a site.

So I started with removing the banner-ads, animations, graphic diversions and the big amount of links to main sections. But then I knew that I needed to import relevant links to the goals and interest of users on every page. And placed these links in the centre and direct near content on that page. My statistics told me that almost 70% used the relevant links and that 60% even ignored the standard menu links, witch in direct leaded to the user its goal.

So in conclusion I would say that well placed relevant links are far more effective then a large amount of basic links. Although there is far too much research needed to see witch relevant links are really relevant, especially if you have over hundreds of pages.

Related Links :

GUUUI - Navigation blindness
Digital Web Magazine
D. Keith Robinson

It has been a while since my last blog post, because of school. Within that time I have a new logo as you see on your left. And bought a new book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Restoring the Character Etic, Stephen R. Covey.