Designing Your E-Commerce Site for Service
September 15, 1999
How easily people move around your site is often dictated by the navigation
system you employ. A few major conventions or ''idioms'' have established themselves on the
Net for facilitating navigation. On a large site, most of the content must
remain initially hidden from the user in order to maintain a simple, digestible
level of visual complexity.
Navigation
''Human computer interface'' scientists will often define ''navigation'' as a
form of prompted, directed search. A visitor navigating around your site
is searching a space of information and functions, looking for something. It''s
the job of your navigation design to assist visitors in finding what you
want them to find.
The most scalable and flexible way to organize your navigation is
the two-level, ''site index'' and ''subindex'' metaphor. This involves:
a simple, clear top-level index - often placed across the top of
the page.
a context-specific subindex, showing you links relevant to your
current position.
Your top-level index should never contain more than seven items - the
number of things the normal human can keep in short-term memory. Keep your
top-level index as clear as possible, with strong graphical cues
to the different parts of your site.
Similarly, your sub- or side-index should be as small as possible, although
you can often break this rule if your layout design allows it. Side index
titles should be short, informative, and either displayed in
small font text or in graphics.
In many cases, you won''t even need the side index. Where the visitor
would become confused or bored by complex single page designs, use
subindexing. Otherwise, leave navigation to the main site-level index.
A few things you should bear in mind when considering navigation design,
especially for e-commerce sites:
Frames are generally a really bad idea. Avoid them if at all
possible - lots of people simply hate them, and they really mess with
people who want to reload single frames, bookmark single frames, and
move backwards or forwards through a series of pages or forms.
Robots are bits of software on search engines which crawl
over your site looking for content to index. You should do everything
to help robots find stuff in your site - ''flattening'' your structure
and having nongraphical links as well as the fancy ones.
Entry Points to your site may not be as you expect -
people will often come in straight from a search engine, or a long-forgotten
bookmark. Make sure they can ''get back out'' of the place they are when they
arrive.
Searching should, if possible, lead to similar navigation
metaphors as normal navigation. This will allow the visitor to conduct
her own navigation without learning new metaphors.
Using software to help generate your navigation menus is probably the
most effective and efficient way, but you can do it by hand if your site
is fairly simple. You just need to be as methodical as the software
would be.
A site should be stylish, functional, and easy to navigate. In order to
compel your visitors to use and reuse your site and the products it
features, however, you need
interactivity.
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