User interfaces

Earley & Associates recently announced a webinar series on Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography is Critical to Information Management. Since you may be asking yourself, “what is content choreography?” we thought we’d share the history of the term and what we mean by it.

Back in March of 2011, a major global high tech company engaged Earley & Associates to work on the redesign of a major website, site search, metadata and all new web CMS and DAM infrastructure. It was an enormous undertaking, headed by Marketing and involving brand managers, the SEO team, content authors, creative agencies, a systems integrator, a user experience design agency, technical consultants, and the IT department. The existing sites were to migrate from traditional navigation, search and single page content to a totally new paradigm of dynamic content collections, where user context would be driven by the search experience more than by navigation or site depth. With personalization. And in multiple languages. Taxonomy and metadata would play an important role in each of these areas, but just how well the whole system was going to hang together (“If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately...”) was a real concern, and the very reason we’d been called in as a sort of SWAT team.

Best Practice #3: Use concise and precise terminology.

As I've mentioned in previous best practices (#1 Less is more and #2 Grouping and chunking), a lot of these design principles apply to any navigational construct -- using concise and intuitive labeling seems like a no-brainer. Given the textually charged interface and the amount of thinking you are asking people to do to navigate your site, mega menus simply force you to follow these rules more strictly.

Hunting and pecking for the right label to click on in a mega menu is no small task, so you really need to avoid the 2 major categories of labeling problems:

1. Excessive length & concatenation: 

When you're trying to cram 20+ links in a hover pane, every character counts. If you've got extraneous words in your labels that make your links harder to scan, or even worse cause wrapping (*gasp*), take out the scalpel and try some creative rewording or restructuring. Labels should be short, sweet and precise, leaving nothing to guessing. Call it what it is as simply as possible, don't try to be fancy - you'll just end up confusing users.

Additionally, avoid concatenating (joining) more than 2 items in one label. Laundry list labels (this, this, this & this) are much harder to scan, as you force the user to read all the way to the end before they can move on. We also recommend you avoid having too many concatenated items in one menu or group. Ampersand-farms can make a menu much harder to scan and it usually means that you have tried to put way too much in one category and need to think about restructuring.

Here's an example of some labelling that breaks these rules:

No matter where I run, I cannot seem to hide from them.

They fly out of website navigation menus with no warning. They assault my senses with link overload.

...they are...mega menus.

Are they a new navigation paradigm or just a bad fad - like acid washed jeans?

And whose idea were they anyways?

It's difficult to trace the starting point of the mega menu (or mega fly-out, or maxi menu, or whatever you call them); they started popping up on e-commerce sites a couple of years ago. The first one I bumped into one, my brow got that wrinkle it gets when I am at once curious and horrified - horrious? curified? I remember thinking, really? This is what we are doing now instead of putting effort into making our drop-downs more usable? Let's just add more drop-down...

Once the initial feeling of horriosity passed, I just forgot about it (aka denial). None of our clients were using them, so I didn't really have to pay attention. And THEN, this March Jakob Nielsen put out an Alertbox saying "Mega Menus Work Well." That was really the clincher. If Jakob/NNG says it's ok, well there goes the neighbourhood.

Since then, we've had a couple of clients go down this road. And I've kind of gotten used to mega menus... in the way that one gets used to white noise or a bad hair cut. To the point where I think that it's time that we acknowledged that a lot of websites are using them - for better or for worse - and that they are here to stay until the next navigation fad comes up. So it's probably a good time to set some basic best practices, to "limit the disasters" (limiter les dégas, as we say in French).

One of the biggest challenges to maintaining quality and value in a taxonomy lies in keeping interests aligned and resolving conflicting perspectives. By its nature, a taxonomy attempts to reconcile diverse perspectives – those of various types of users, engaging in diverse tasks. It also needs to support the needs of merchandisers who are vying for valuable site real estate. But what is the true purpose of the taxonomy from a strategic perspective? Is it to market the company’s offerings? Educate customers? Sell merchandise? Help the customer find answers?