The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.
User interface complexity increases when a single feature or hypertext link is presented in multiple ways. Users rarely understand duplicates as such, and often waste time repeating efforts or visiting the same page twice by mistake.
Links that go directly to a site's interior pages enhance usability because, unlike generic links, they specifically relate to users' goals. Websites should encourage deep linking and follow three guidelines to support its users.
An early tweaking raised the Salt Lake City website to 70% compliance with homepage usability guidelines. Inside the site, however, task support falls far below medal contention.
Most site maps fail to convey multiple levels of the site's information architecture. In usability tests, users often overlook site maps or can't find them. Complexity is also a problem: a map should be a map, not a navigational challenge of its own.
Designers of DVDs have failed to profit from the lessons of previous media. DVD menu structures are baroque, less usable, less pleasurable, less effective. It is time to take DVD design as seriously as we do web design. The field needs discipline, attention, to the User Experience, and standardization of control and display formats.
Web users go straight for content and ignore navigation areas. Limited structural navigation and local navigation still help, but general navigation should be avoided and generic links minimized to the truly useful.
Anything done by more than 90% of big
sites becomes a de-facto design standard that must be followed unless
an alternative design achieves 100% increased usability.
iCab, a web browser introduced in 1999, uses the LINK tags from the page headers to provide additional navigation links to the users. This structural navigation provides a valuable alternative to users.
People are not frogs, making it difficult to navigate 3D computer spaces: stick to 2D for most navigation designs. Shun virtual reality gimmicks that distract from users' goals
Instead of emulating the real world, websites should build on the strengths of the medium and go beyond what's possible in physical reality: be non-linear, customize service, ignore geography.
Four years of progress in Web browsers have given us more fancy presentation but almost no improvements in helping users navigate the Web and getting the information they need.
Subsites can be used in hierarchical information spaces to give particular prominence to a certain level of the hierarchy which is used as the subsite designator.
There is now a profusion of choices when it comes to web browsers, and market shares can change rapidly. The only certain trend on the Internet and WWW is that change happens so quickly that it is impossible to predict what will happen. Even so, the following changes ought to happen, so hopefully they will be the next trends.
This chapter from Jakob Nielsen's 1995 book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond explores a variety of mechanisms for helping users navigate in digital environments including history lists, bookmarks, overview diagrams, and navigational dimensions and metaphors.
Hypertext systems include a Presentation level, a Hypertext Abstract Machine (HAM) level, and a Database level. The following sections describe each of the levels in further detail, starting at the bottom. (Chapter 5 from Jakob Nielsen's book, Multimedia and Hypertext.)
A review of the Macintosh CD-ROM versions of The Manhole, the Time Table of History, and the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog with emphasis on their usability and their support of hypertext navigation. Based on the discussion of these hypertexts the following general principles are found to be useful for analyzing hypertext user interfaces: Navigational dimensions and their explicitness, directionality and literalness, landmarks, locational orientation, history lists, and backtrack mechanisms.
Originally published as: Nielsen, J. (1990). Three medium-sized hypertexts on CD-ROM. ACM SIGIR Forum 24, 1, 2-10.