5 Tips for Providing Effective Web Navigation

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on November 03, 2009

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For those interested in the connection between the tips listed below and a study of five state Department of Revenue websites, read on past the list.
1. Organize primary navigation menus by audience when your users easily identify with an audience category (e.g., For Job Seekers, For Investors, For Students, etc.).  My experience conducting usability tests supports the key result of a study published last year in the journal Technical Communication:  “Navigation menus that contained links organized by audience were selected more often than menus that contained links organized by topic” (May 2008, p. 186).
2. Precede the audience name with “For” – it helps users quickly recognize that this is information for an audience, not about an audience.  For example, in one usability study I led, there was more task success with the label “For Business” than with “Business” alone because users had a better idea of what to expect. 
3. Provide a secondary topic-based menu to supplement the audience-based menu.  Most users like to have more than one path to the same destination.  In addition, some specialist users may not easily fit into any of the primary audience categories.  Secondary topic menus can be useful in meeting their needs.
4. Guide the user’s eye to what is most important by means of placement, size, images, and subdued color.  On a typical home page, this will usually be the primary menu, the secondary menu, and then news and features, in that order.  When everything is presented in the same way, users have to take longer and work harder to orient themselves to the page.
5. List a selection of 4-5 popular or important links below each audience category.  This will save a significant percentage of users a click to the main audience pathway page and allow them to go directly to what they are looking for.
As part of a recent project, we met with users of a state Department of Revenue (DOR) website and asked them to rate the home pages of five peer sites, focusing especially on navigation:
• Iowa Department of Revenue
• Louisiana Department of Revenue
• Massachusetts Department of Revenue
• Minnesota Department of Revenue
• North Carolina Department of Revenue
The users rated Louisiana the highest and Minnesota the lowest.  So what did Louisiana get right and Minnesota get wrong?  Here are a few summary points.
The Louisiana DOR home page presents three large audience categories front and center, each of which includes an attractive photo of a person, a subdued color, and four related links.  These audience-based categories are very clearly the main doorways into the site for the three main audiences:  Individual Taxpayers, Business Taxpayers, and Tax Professionals.  A topic-based menu is evident just below the page header, but it’s obviously subordinate to the audience menu.
In contrast, finding the audience-based navigation on the Minnesota DOR home page is a little bit like playing “Where’s Waldo”.  It’s there, but see how long it takes you to find it.  The users in our study said they were not sure where to focus – the elements in the main body of the page all seem to have more or less equal weight.  They did not feel the design guided their eye to the priority information.
This was also the issue users identified with the Massachusetts DOR home page, which they rated second lowest.  Although it presents the audience categories by means of tabs near the top of the page, users felt this home page was “too busy” and “cluttered.” When users describe a page in this way, they are saying it is not easy for them to figure out where to focus first, second, and so on.
In the middle of the ratings were Iowa and North Carolina.  Users did not like Iowa’s color palette – to them the lime green was an “odd” choice not suitable for a government agency.  And they thought the font was too small.  But for ease of use, Iowa came out slightly ahead of North Carolina because of its relative simplicity, the lack of scrolling required, and the selection of links provided for each audience category.
The top-rated Louisiana DOR home page is not perfect.  The rectangular graphic links in the middle of the page look too much like advertisements and would be ignored by users, and the light grey font is a little hard to read and is too small in the news and announcements section.  But overall, Louisiana’s home page provides a better front door than either Massachusetts’ or Minnesota’s.

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