Confusing menus and links: the web’s biggest challenge

Posted on October 18th, 2009 in Customer Centric.

To make menus and links simpler you have to think like a customer. You also have to reduce the number of links and focus on the task at hand.

If you visit the BBC homepage and choose “Sport” you are brought to a page about sport. Just sport. The critical first screen is all about sport. No links to news or weather or business. Just sport. If you click on Football you arrive at a page that’s just about Football. Just Football. Not cricket. Not rugby. Not golf. Just football. If you click on “Premier League” you get to a page dedicated to the Premier League.

This is not web design. It’s web management. It’s about eliminating all choices that are not connected with the customer’s current task, which in the above example might be: Find out the latest news about the Premier League.

Some time ago, if you looked at BBC pages you would have found a common navigation going across the top of them: Home, News, Sport, Radio, etc. Not so anymore. The BBC has a clearer, simpler, more focused set of pages. Focused on the task at hand, rather than the task that might be.

Web teams are often plagued by what-if exception-based navigation design thinking. “What if the person on the Premier League page is in India and really wants to know if Drop Dead Gorgeous is on tonight?” Well, tough. They’re going to have to go back to the homepage.

Web teams need to toughen up. They need to make tough decisions. Putting every piece of content you have on your website serves nobody but confuses and annoys everybody. I’ve often heard customers say: “Yeah, it’s on the website alright. Just try finding it!” Cluttering your pages with lots and lots of links that are worded with organization-centric language (jargon, tool names, branding terms) is truly terrible design and management. Placing irrelevant or distracting cross-links sends people in the wrong direction, wastes their time and increases their frustration.

Remember the Amazon pages some years back? They had lots of links at the top of the page that followed you around the site. Links like: Kitchen, Software, Electronics. Doesn’t happen today. You just get one big link near the top right-hand corner: “Shop All Departments.” The more you drill down through the site, the more the navigation focuses. It focuses, based on the decisions you have made, to point you forward. So, if you’re in “Bathroom Accessories” the links are for: Bathroom Mirrors, Bathtub Accessories, Scales, etc.

One of the most common and most confusing forms of navigation around is the one that brings previous levels with it as you drill down. SAP is just one of the companies that uses this approach. Let’s say you click on Solutions and keep clicking down until you get to “SAP ERP Features and Functions: End-User Service Delivery.” If you scan down the left navigation, you will see a link for “Services.” If you click on that link you don’t get more on ERP-related services, but rather you get sent to the homepage for SAP overall services.

Menus and links need to be designed in the context of the task the customer is trying to complete. That means stripping away higher-level options and creating links that point forward based on the task at hand.

 

10 responses

  1. Charlie Holland says:

    Added on October 18th, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    Sounds sensible.

    What’s your take on breadcrumb links? Are they a useful feature or should the ‘Back’ button suffice?

  2. Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:

    Added on October 18th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    Charlie, breadcrumb links can have a supporting use, but I think their usefulness is overblown. Many people often miss them. The BBC does up a variant of the breadcrumb in the top of their left nav. So, some use in very big and complex websites, but they are not easy to desgn well.

  3. Michael Smethurst says:

    Added on October 19th, 2009 at 9:47 am

    Interesting article as always.

    Related to the breadcrumb issue, isn’t there also a problem with there sometimes being too much detail in the left hand navigation? Readers may not notice that the links have changed even if they are relevant.

    I work in UK local government. My favourite “best in class” websites are those of East Sussex and Surrey county councils. In brief, they both use well structured navigation pages with relevant “forward pointing links” (with brief glossing text to help guide the reader) BUT crucially the links are in the body of the page.

    The left hand navigation is by contrast largely static, with links either only back to the very top content areas (roads/transport, adult social care, children’s services etc). On the East Sussex pages, if you are in, say, Chidren and Families, then as you drill down the site, the left hand navigation also keeps showing the top level links for children/families - BUT nothing deeper than than that. The navigation stays static, and does not attempt to duplicate the changing navigation you see in the body of the page.

    What both these sites have is a pretty rigourous distinction between navigation pages and content pages - which I think is a very good thing.

    I would be very interested to hear your comments on this.
    I agree it is a huge issue and challenge.

    Best Reagards,

    Michael.

  4. Mike Simpson says:

    Added on October 20th, 2009 at 8:42 am

    Being pedantic, the BBC Sport page does in fact have small links on the left, below the main menu, to the News and Weather sections. Which doesn’t seem unreasonable as the three topics are related, both practically (Will it rain at the match tomorrow?) and in the public consciousness because sport and weather are semi-autonomous sections of news programmes. This doesn’t of course invalidate your perceptive comments.

  5. Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:

    Added on October 20th, 2009 at 11:36 am

    Mike, I knew someone would spot that!

  6. Mike Simpson says:

    Added on October 20th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    I just checked the SAP site and boy, that’s not a good menu, is it? Pointing at any grey top-level item opens an orange submenu to the right but clicking on the same top-level item opens the same submenu in graded light grey inline with the main menu, with the item you just clicked turned white.

    You then get exactly the same point-orange-right and click-graded-inline functionality at the subsubmenu level with the original menu item returning to grey (ie. identical to all the top level items you didn’t click!) and the submenu item white. Then you have the whole malarkey again at subsubsubmenu level except that, if you follow through, the submenu level you’ve just left goes dark grey! What?

    It’s unbelievably confusing, and anyone coming in directly from an external link will have no way to know how many levels down they are or what top-level section they are in. There’s not even a ‘home’ item in the menu to let you start from scratch. Wow. Bad.

    There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with submenus, so long as you can clearly see the “wheels within wheels and fires within fires”. A menu has to present a very simple, graphical indication of what levels you have gone down through to get to where you is.

    If there are too many levels, then the site’s probably too big that’s the time to start splitting it into separate sites with their own menus replacing the original submenus and everything moves up one rung.

  7. Brian says:

    Added on October 21st, 2009 at 1:24 am

    I think the call for web teams to “toughen up” goes to the core of the problem. Web teams are typically in comm’s or IT. Both have traditionally been “do what you’re told” sections within organisations, employing skilled personnel who were supposed to deliver what management wanted without much questioning. As I see it, Gerry champions a new business model, where management are going to have to learn that (one of my favourite Web 2 quotes) “the people formerly known as the audience” have a lot more say, and the web team are the ‘business analysts’ translating what each group is saying to the other. Being middlemen has risks too but demands a much more active role of web teams, many of whom are going to need more authority to directly represent customers to decision-makers, rather than just cooperate in broadcasting company PR.

  8. Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:

    Added on October 21st, 2009 at 7:32 am

    Brian, that’s an excellent quote: “the people formerly known as the audience”! I think I’ll use that one.

  9. Amy Marshall says:

    Added on October 22nd, 2009 at 7:17 pm

    Hear, hear! It’s amazing how often those overseeing web projects want a website to Do Everything, and they don’t want to make tough decisions - which means the people making the tough decisions are the customers trying to navigate the site! Thanks as always for robust clarity…

  10. Matt says:

    Added on October 23rd, 2009 at 12:55 am

    Gerry another good article. I notice you do this on your own left hand menu, but, I can’t resist it…

    Go here.
    http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/webinars.htm
    Click on Client feedback
    Abracadabra, it swaps places in the menu with customer carewords.

    Then go here.
    http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new_thinking.htm

    Click on subscribing.
    Hey presto!
    Disappearing menu.

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