Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible.
The user's target was at the top of the page in 98-point font. But she failed to find it because the panel auto-rotated instead of staying still.
In a miniature information architecture, coverage of a single topic is chunked into units that are connected through simple navigation.
Mega-dropdown menus mainly worked well in user testing, but vague images and poor topic organization caused very low success rates in some cases.
Big 2-D drop-downs can facilitate site navigation - if they're properly designed. Two examples illustrate some mega-menu usability pitfalls.
Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A-Z listings for presenting options to users.
Big, 2-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain users' choices.
Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation determines how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve.
New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they're much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago.
Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult.
13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers from AJAX overkill and difficult customization.
On the Web, users have a clear mental model for a hypertext link: it should bring up a new page. Within-page links violate this model and thus cause confusion.
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.
Make new or follow-up information easily accessible from the location of the original information or transaction.
Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products if another website area seems like the perfect place to look. Cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem.
Textual links should be colored and underlined to achieve the best perceived affordance of clickability, though there are a few exceptions to these guidelines.
People get lost and move in circles when websites use the same link color for visited and new destinations. To reduce navigational confusion, select different colors for the two types of links.
Spare your users the misery of being dumped into PDF files without warning. Create special gateway pages that summarize the contents of big documents and guide users gently into the PDF morass.
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.
Guest column by Don Norman: 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.
Drop-down menus are often more trouble than they are worth and can be confusing because Web designers use them for several different purposes. Also, scrolling menus reduce usability when they prevent users from seeing all their options in a single glance.
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.
The 1997 redesign of the Sun Microsystems' Web site aimed to improve the visual appearance, ease of navigation, and performance of the Web site.
Some browsers pop up a short explanation of a link *before* the user selects it. Such link titles can give users a preview of where the link will lead, improve their navigation, and reduce disorientation.
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.
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.)
This paper presents the methods used to design the user interface and overall structure of Sun Microsystems' first intranet. Sun had an extensive set of information available on the WWW with the home page as the access point, but also wanted to provide employees access to internal information that could not be made available to the Internet at large.
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.