Designing Displays and Navigations

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Designing Displays and Navigations
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Web Design Pyramid
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Content Organization

• Organizational schemes classification systems
  for organizing content into groups
• Organizational structures defining the
  relationships among the groups

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Graphic overview scheme and structure

• You have a mass of content that you want your
  users to be able to find

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How to Organize so Users Can Find Things?

• First, group related things, forming the groups
  in terms of the way users think.

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This is an organizational scheme

• Now give names to the groups, or have the users
  do that

Group D
Group A
Group E
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Group B
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Next how do the groups relate to each other?

• Perhaps in a hierarchy

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How do the groups relate to each other, continued

• Perhaps with hyperlinks

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Those are two organizational structures

• Remember
• A scheme groups similar things together
• A structure shows how those groups are related
• And how we discover how users think how they see
  the groupings

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Organizational Schemes

• Familiar in everyday life
• Phone book
• Appointment book
• Shopping mall diagram with store locations

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These are exact organizational schemes

• Alphabetical phone book, for example
• Chronological appointment book, for example
• Geographical shopping mall diagram, for example

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Not always possible

• Where can I find sardines packed in water, with
  no salt added?
• In the canned fish section?
• In the dietetic foods section?

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Supermarket is an example of an ambiguous
organizational scheme

• Ambiguous often has a negative connotation. We
  use it to describe organizational situations
  where there is more than one reasonable way to
  group things.
• We identify four types of ambiguous
  organizational schemes
• Topical
• Task-oriented
• Audience-specific
• Metaphor-driven

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Topical organizational scheme

• Organizes content by subject
• Examples
• Library subject index
• Encyclopedia
• Chapter titles in textbooks
• Website home pages (usually combined with other
  schemes as well)

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Task-Oriented Organizational Scheme

• Organizes content by what user wants to do.

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Task-oriented organizational scheme

• Example Autobytel.com

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Audience-specific organizational scheme

• Useful when there are two or more distinct user
  groups
• User may navigate to appropriate page and
  bookmark it

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Audience-specific organizational scheme

• Example Bank of Montreal

Specific audiences
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Metaphor-driven organizational scheme

• Shows group by a visual metaphor.
• Not many examples, because it is difficult to
  find metaphors that will work with all users.
• Possible example pet supply store

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See the problem?

• This is a hamster, but what if your user thinks
  its a rat, and hates rats?

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Hybrid organizational scheme

• Combines multiple organizational schemes
• Quite common, but must be done with care to avoid
  confusion
• Example Nordstrom

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Hybrid organizational scheme example
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Organizational Structures

• Review
• Organizational schemes create groups
• Organizational structures define the relations
  between groups

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Types of organizational structures

• Hierarchy
• Hypertext
• Database

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Hierarchical organizational structure

• Structuring by rank or level
• A tree, in computer science terms

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An organization chart is a hierarchy
President
Manufacturing
Marketing
Distribution
Research
E
B
C
D
A
Etc.
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Definitions

• Breadth of a hierarchy the number of links
  available at each level
• Depth of a hierarchy the number of levels
• Broad shallow hierarchies offer many choices at
  each level
• Narrow deep hierarchies require many clicks to
  get to the bottom level
• Users prefer broad shallow hierarchies

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Hypertext organizational structures

• Almost always combined with other structures
• Consists of adding links to a page
• Hard to find a commercial website that does not
  use hypertext

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Database organizational structures

• Database organizational structure provides a
  bottom-up view, whereas a hierarchy provides a
  top-down
• Both have their place
• In a database structure the user fills in data,
  and is then taken directly to the right page. One
  click, when it works ideally.

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Database example selecting a car model
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Visual Organization

• In this part you will learn about
• Four principles of visual organization and how to
  apply them
• Proximity
• Alignment
• Consistency
• Contrast

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Four organizing principles

• Four principles of visual organization and how to
  apply them
• Proximity
• Alignment
• Consistency
• Contrast

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Proximity
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By using proximity to group related things
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Four organizing principles proximity

• See next slide for a tongue-in-cheek example
  mindless application of alphabetic organization
• Preview the result is a hodge-podge as seen by
  the user

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Dans Clothing the mindless version
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What groups would make sense?

• Womens clothes, Mens clothes, Kids clothes,
  Special sizes
• July Specials, Sales on rainwear, Closeout on
  pink socks
• Store locations, Store hours
• Open an account, Your account status
• Check out
• Email us.

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Dans Clothing with sensible groups
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Continuity flow, or alignment
We see curves AB and CD, not AC and DB, and not
AD and BC
We see two rows of circles, not two L-shaped
groups
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Can you use alignment (one form of continuity) to
improve this page?
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But why stop? Left-align both columns to get
vertical alignment also
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Avoid centered alignment for lines that are of
nearly equal length
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Lines are now greatly different in length reader
knows its intentional
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Orpheus Chamber Orchestra nice use of proximity
and alignment
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The principles are seen in combination

• Eddie Bauer site (next slide) has
• Horizontal alignment
• Vertical alignment
• Proximity, to group like items
• Consistency, in type size and font for links
• Contrast, between SALE and most else

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Dont be a slave to centered alignment . . .
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. . . which is OK, but isnt this better?
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Note the consistent layout in the next few slides
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One of the pages reachable from the previous slide
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One of the pages reachable from the previous slide
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Example can you use consistency to improve this
page?
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Sure make the buttons the same size
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Sure use the same font everywhere
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How can we make this more interesting?
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Use more contrast
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Talk about boring!
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This is a quiz! (Not really)

• Look again at the previous slide.
• How many ways can you improve it?
• Can you put all four principles to work?
• Next slide shows one possible way
• You can find lots of others

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Heres one way, but there are many other
possibilities
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Navigation Design

• In this part you will learn about
• Site-level navigation making it easy for the
  user to get around the site
• Page-level navigation making it easy for the
  user to find things on a page

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Navigation connections

• Good navigation builds on good content
  organization
• Choose a navigation system that reflects the
  contents organizational structure
• Visual design and navigation design are
  interrelated
• Choose visual navigation elements that build
  context for a user
• A navigational system is a visual representation
  of an organizational structure

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Three types of navigation systems

• Hierarchical
• Derived from hierarchical organizational
  structure
• Ad hoc
• Hyperlinks
• Database
• Search engines
• The most common is hierarchical, with many ad hoc
  links added

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Rare to use only one

• Most websites build on a judicious combination of
  these three, with one dominant theme
• Hierarchical plus hyperlinks very common

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A pure hierarchy is rare
We add links to facilitate moving around the
hierarchy without going all the way to the top
note extra links at bottom level
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Global navigation

• For a small site, it may be possible to show the
  major links on every page

Global navigation
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Global navigation bar can be vertical
Global navigation
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Showing more levels in the hierarchy

• Drop-downs or pull-outs can show the next level

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Breadcrumbs show user This is where you are how
you got here
Breadcrumbs
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Many sites have subsites
Subsites
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Ad hoc links are very common
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The most familiar example of database navigation
Google
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Graphical navigation bar
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Building context for the user with navigation bars
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Be careful with metaphors what do these mean?
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Intended meanings. Moral add words, too!
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So add words!
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Some standard meanings

• Label and meaning
• Home the main entry point of a Web site,
  generally containing the top-level links to the
  site
• Search find related pages by supplying a word or
  a phrase
• About Us information about the company that
  created the site
• Shop browse for merchandise
• Check Out supply shipping and billing
  information, complete transaction

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Menus pack in a lot of information note the
dropdown from Software
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Site maps

• Textual
• Takes work
• For a big site, must be selective
• Graphical
• Coolfor a small site.
• A site map is no substitute for good navigation

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Graphical site map example
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Frames

• A frame is an area of the browser window that
  stays visible as the user moves from page to page
• A simple way to provide global navigation
• But hogs screen real estate you cant do
  anything else with that space
• May not print
• Hard (impossible?) to bookmark
• Used much less often than formerly

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Built-in browser services

• History of pages visited
• Back button
• Forward button
• Color coding of links
• Unvisited
• Visited
• Active
• Dont mess with the convention that blue is an
  unvisited link.

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Page-level navigation aids

• Remember proximity, alignment, consistency make
  the layout obvious
• Make size of text box appropriate to the amount
  of data
• Show which fields are required, with or
  Required
• Make button placement consistent before or after
  its associated text

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Make error reports clear

• Say explicitly what the problem was
• Perhaps change the color of the offending box
• Show as many errors as possible on one page
  dont make user correct one error per attempt to
  send the data
• Dont make user re-enter correct data
• Sounds obvious, huh? Then why are so many forms
  terrible?
• Sales are lost at this point, in big bad
  quantities

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Summary

• In this chapter you learned about
• Organizational schemes classification systems
  for organizing content into groups
• Exact Alphabetical, Chronological, Geographical
• Ambiguous Topical, Task-oriented,
  Audience-specific, metaphor-driven
• Organizational structures defining the
  relationships among the groups
• Hierarchy, Hypertext, Database

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Summary

• In this chapter you learned
• Four principles of visual organization
• Proximity
• Alignment
• Consistency
• Contrast
• Some ways they can be applied
• The message
• There are principles you can learn them and use
  them

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Summary

• In this chapter you have learned that
• Effective navigation is a combination of good
  content organization and good visual organization
• The main navigational system is hierarchical,
  with a lot of hyperlinks added
• You can learn from all the bad sites youve
  suffered with