Sunday, 12th August 2007, 5 Comments »
Contextual sub-navigation
Could we do away with the tree metaphor for site structure?
Few years ago while working on a project, we very briefly considered the idea of doing away with a traditional hierarchical sub-navigation and creating what we called a ‘contextual’ sub-navigation.
Our thinking was that most sites should follow the practice of inter-linking related pages within the content of a page, and that the best sites act more like a fight between a gang of Kraken and a gang of Giant Squid when viewed from an architectural point of view, rather than a tree. Basically our concept would have replaced the branch/leaf metaphor with a tentacle or a chemical structure metaphor.
In our specific project the site was content ’shallow’ in the most ‘important’ areas, while the rest of the site went quite deep. This ‘unleveled’ content really showed through the sub-navigation within the main area’s content pages and we felt it could potentially diminish the clients credibility. We also felt that visitor’s stumbling across a page via a search engine could be potentially be better ‘led’ from the ‘found’ page into the rest of the site.
We decided not to go with the idea for a couple of reasons;
- We didn’t have the time or budget to user test the concept
- People are already very familiar with the tree metaphor for websites and we didn’t want to take the risk of not testing it correctly
- People could potentially become easily confused if the ’sub-navigation’ area changed on every page they visited
- We couldn’t do the menus programmatically, because the content editors wanted editorial control
- We felt we were making extra work for content editors if/when they created new pages
This is an idea I really like to revisit one day and user test, given the flat nature of wikis and the weird content paths people can take using tagging. I’m not sure if it’ll be such a stretch to communicate this sub-navigation metaphor to people (and clients) these days as it was then.
5 Comments to “Contextual sub-navigation”
What do you mean by “We couldn’t do the menus programatically, because the content editors wanted editorial control”?
Was the problem handing over editorial control, or mechanically extracting links from the content and turning them into sub-navigation? Or something else?
We could generate the sub-navigation without human intervention, but we couldn’t (at the time) figure out a good way of allowing the content editors to add, remove and control the link hierarchy of the sub-navigation (which is really important to them).
There was also a potential trust issue with the programmatic approach (How do I know that the system is getting the best links for this page?), but we never got far enough down that path for it to become an issue. There was a few other areas we never really explored with the programmatic approach, managing page removals in the sub-navigation, content suggestion through search results, etc.
Yep, I see. Well, it’s lucky time has delivered the solution for the content editors… :)
That’s an interesting way of describing the concept though I wonder if you are putting too much emphasis on the sitemap aspect. It is possible to have your cake and eat it too with page layouts that are designed to expose various contextual link paths in blocks of “supporting content”.
You could do this with a heirachical or a flat site structure, what is most important is that the contextual groupings make sense to users (contextual groups may actually make more sense as navigation than a menu of sub-pages, since most people don’t relate to information in a hierachical way).
With the rise of tags and wikis it’s probably a better time now to explore alternative primary and secondary navigation mechanisms than a few years ago. Despite this, many people will feel uncomfortable or disorientated without some kind navigation bar or menu.
You can do away with the traditional navigation tree from a technical perspective: the majority of navigation comes from search engines, the whole point of the web is linking to content within the context of other content, people prefer in content links (and navigation is largely ignored), and we can reflect real usage through referals and other analytics.