If customers get the first click right they have twice as much of a chance of completing their task than if they get it wrong.

Nobody likes taking a wrong turn, particularly when it’s your first turn. If you have travelled 10 kilometers in the wrong direction, then it feels like you are travelling back 20 kilometers.

Linking is the foundation of the Web. It is its key distinguishing characteristic. It is what makes the Web the Web. The essence of linking is navigation. The essence of navigation is helping someone get someplace. A link is a signpost, a promise.

Source: my.intrateam.dk Posted by admin 90 days, 2 hours, 34 minutes ago

The game is changing and there’s a major shift happening in the way we design websites. I’ve been in endless meetings with heated discussions over website or intranet navigation and information architecture. Should the navigation be aligned following departmental structures, product lines or copied from the competitors?

Once the navigation has been decided, the actual implementation often turns out to be complex and expensive. Subsequently, online analytics has unfortunately shown that the navigation is...

Source: jboye.com Posted by admin 138 days, 2 hours, 59 minutes ago

People are on the Web to do something very specific. Great navigation relentlessly focuses on what is ahead.

"This website really annoys me," an engineer told me recently. "I click several times just to get to the product page, then I click on Version 4, and then several clicks later I click on Configuration and what happens? I'm back up at the main product support section. That's really annoying."

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by admin 293 days, 3 hours, 31 minutes ago

ll employees carry with them the baggage of prior knowledge of the organisation and a host of good, bad and ugly user experiences with the intranet.

All best practice dictates that we involve our employees in the design process but the inevitable outcome of this is that we reinforce design and navigation prejudices and perpetuate mistakes.

Source: intranetizen.com Posted by bee 317 days, 5 hours, 43 minutes ago

The idea behind my navigation stress test is to ask some really hard questions about your web site navigation to see if it can "pass". It is called a "stress test" because most pages will not pass. The failures may be serious, or they may not matter at all, but at least by performing the test you will have discussed the navigation issues and made conscious design decisions.

The questions are detailed ways to ask about 3 basic concerns users often have upon arriving at a page:

• Where am I?
• What's here?
• Where can I go?

Source: instone.org Posted by support 463 days, 10 hours, 45 minutes ago

One of the intranets that we maintain has an immense products section, upon which material relating to a broad product portfolio is available at all times, and constantly growing!

As part of the organisation’s internal communications strategy, a few of the products are given the spotlight on the intranet at any given time, for instance when a product launch or rebrand is looming. The aim here is that the audience can access details on those products simply and easily, preferably with just one click.

Source: www.contentformula.com Posted by support 488 days, 3 hours, 1 minute ago

Phase 2

Content audit

Back in the good old days when the IT department allowed me to use DOS (the operating system that I was brought up on,) I managed to do some jiggery-pokery and get a complete intranet file-listing. And a few deft keystrokes later, I was spreadsheet-a-go-go.

My previous analysis already told me what was popular content on the intranet.  The spreadsheet gave me the complete picture and what kind of state it was in, structurally.

Using our Google Search Appliance, I als...

Source: intranetdiary.blogspot.com Posted by support 499 days, 3 hours, 2 minutes ago

No other single factor causes greater customer frustration and dissatisfaction than confusing menus and links.

The root cause of most confusing menus and links is organizational language and thinking. Take, for example, the FAQ. Over the years, I've found that most customers don't even know what an FAQ is. That certainly surprised me because I thought everyone knew that FAQ meant Frequently Asked Questions. I thought everyone knew that, just like everyone knows that the logo is a link to the homepage.

However, the FAQ has a deeper problem. From a customers' perspective it is essentially a useless link. It is a classic example of organization-centric language. I was trying to renew my TV license recently and was offered two choices: General FAQs and Online Service FAQs...

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by bee 538 days, 3 hours, 39 minutes ago

Is good navigation important? A client recently asked me: “Navigation, isn’t that a bit old hat? I mean, this is the time of Google. Doesn’t everybody just search?”

No, they don’t. Good navigation and good links are vital for the success of a website. A search feature is an added bonus, sure. But if you have one, it has to be as good as Google or even better.

Less than 5% uses the search feature Google might be insanely popular but that doesn’t mean the search feature on your website is too.

Source: webusability-blog.com Posted by bee 640 days, 13 hours, 59 minutes ago

Every once in a while, intranet teams have to justify the amount of time they spend structuring their sites and improving navigation.

Stakeholders, often very senior ones, ask: ‘Why don’t we just provide search, like Google’. This would save the time spent developing a user-centred site structure, and after all, ‘it works for Google, and it’s the most popular site on the web’.

It’s an interesting idea, and on the surface, an attractive one. Search is something that can be bought as a product, and deployed. It’s even possible to get a Google-branded product for enterprise deployment.

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 646 days, 7 hours, 59 minutes ago