Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, January 3, 2005:
Summary:
To manage a huge, worldwide information space, users need proven features like fat links, typed links, integrated search and browsing, overview maps, big-screen designs, and physical hypertext.
Tim Berners-Lee's genius in inventing the Web in 1991 was to strip the hypertext concept to the bone and design a system with minimal features that worked across the Internet.
The Web really has only one feature: uni-directional plain links that replace the existing page with a new one. Yes, the feature has twists, such as the ability to go back or open the link in a new window (which I recommend against), but fundamentally, the Web has no advanced hypertext capabilities.
Although many users like tabs, I'm personally less enamored of them, possibly because I use a fairly large screen (2048 x 1536 pixels). With a big screen, it's usually better to manage multiple pages in windows rather than in tabs. Taskbar usability improves because you can see more of the window title in the buttons on the bottom of the screen. Also, a big screen lets you display multiple Web pages simultaneously, which dramatically improves the usability of critical tasks like collect, compare, and choose. Still, tabs do have their advantages, and in any case, they're only one possible implementation of fat links.
(Note: Bookmarks are a special kind of link; Firefox's ability to open all of a folder's bookmarks at once is thus a fat bookmark.)
Browsers could implement this distinction today by simply looking at the domain name in the URL: if you're displaying a page from foobar.com, links to foobar.com pages are internal and all others are external. A slightly more advanced system might recognize the possibility of a given company owning multiple domains.
Many website designers have attempted to design icons that notify users about links to external sites, but these attempts usually fail because the designs are non-standard. Jakob's Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites and form their expectations based on their aggregated user experience. Thus, unless all sites have the same icons (and use them consistently), it's a doomed endeavor to visualize link typing with icons, rather than to embed types at a deeper system level.
Of course, typed links could have many uses beyond the simple internal/external distinction. For example, browsers could treat destinations that require micropayment or registration differently than free links. Similarly, they could distinguish between links to arguments that support or refute a position.
The benefit of explicit structural commands is that they free users from slavery to individual site designs. Users need no longer suffer under bad sites. And, even on good sites, they can simply use a standard command that's always the same rather than spend time trying to comprehend each site’s navigation. That's a primary reason for the Back button's popularity: it lets you avoid searching the page for a link that might accomplish the same thing.
In 1990, Bell Communications Research's SuperBook project proved the benefits of integrating search results with navigation menus and other information space overviews. There are three basic approaches to this. The first is simply to annotate each navigation label with the number of search hits in the area it points to.
A second, more advanced approach would use an indication of aggregated search relevance. A site might, for example, emphasize an area containing one extremely relevant page over an area with ten less relevant pages. In any case, the key is to give users a prospective view of the extent to which different navigation options relate to the current query.
Also, once users arrive at a page, it's beneficial to highlight query terms. Doing so makes it easy for users to judge why the page was deemed relevant, and thus easier to decide whether to stay or leave. Highlighting query terms also helps users narrow their attention to the most relevant part of the page.
A third approach to integrating search and browsing is to display higher-value advertising. If the site knows the user's most recent query, it can display ads related to those keywords instead of more generic ads. Of course, ads on content pages will never be as successful as the same ads on a SERP, because the user's behavior has changed from seeking to reading. While on the search engine, users are looking for someplace else to go, and thus are very likely to click on any ad that promises to solve the problem inherent in the current query. On a content page, that same ad conflicts with the user's goal to process the information and possibly return to the search engine to select the next destination. Still, an ad that's relevant to the user's current problem (as indicated by recent query terms) should beat advertising chosen with less situational awareness.
Placing search ads on content pages should particularly benefit players -- like Yahoo! and MSN -- that combine search engines with networks of other services. Such sites can directly transfer their knowledge of user queries to the non-search parts of their network. Other sites might extract the user query terms from the referrer information that's usually received when visitors arrive from search engines. Or, search engines might stop passing along the current query string and start selling it as a separate data stream to destination sites.
(Once we start transferring keyword relevance to post-SERP behavior, it will be interesting to measure how fast the user's intent diverges and thus how fast the value of targeting the previous intent decays. I would not be surprised if the keywords' value evaporated within five minutes. Web users are fickle.)
Navigation menus and site maps are two common approximations of overview maps, but neither provides the full set of features that users need. Due to space constraints, navigation menus show only a limited view of users' options. Site maps don't highlight current location, partly because users must leave their current location to access the site map as a separate pageview.
Certainly, it would help if designers followed the twenty-eight design guidelines for site map usability. But ultimately, designers must integrate overview diagrams with the browser to support three core features:
Once we get screens the size and resolution of a broadsheet newspaper, the user interface will change. It will become possible to rely more on spatial hypertext and less on linear scrolling. In fact, the very concept of a page may vanish and be replaced by higher-level aggregate units that combine multiple data feeds.
The prevalence of portlets on intranet portals is a weak precursor to the potential for integrating multiple information units that can be independently activated and updated.
Several doomed projects have tried to implement physical hypertext on the Web. The most prominent and clueless was CueCat: a barcode scanner that let users scan magazine ads to display more information about advertised products.
CueCat failed for two reasons:
I mention collaboration as my last feature, because it's the one for which old research provides the least guidance. There's some work on shared hypertexts, where people build up a collaborative knowledge base and/or solve other problems together. Wikis offer a primitive example of the power of multi-user hypertext. But mainly, collaboration remains a field with immense promise and little progress.
Is there any hope that the next decade will bring more progress? I think so. For one, most of the ideas mentioned here are rich sources of user interface patents, which offer a sustainable competitive advantage. (I invented at least five potential patents while writing this article, but didn't bother filing because I'm not in the business of suing infringers; a big company could rack up the patents if so inclined.)
The last ten years were a black hole: much attention was focused on doomed attempts at making the Web more like television. Hopefully, the next decade will focus instead on empowering users and giving us the features we need to master a worldwide information space.
Copyright 2005 by Jakob Nielsen