Website Structural Navigation

Introduction

Imagine a group of friends decide to play a joke. They blindfold one person in that group and drop them off in the middle of the woods with no map. That person is lost and has no guide or reference point to make it back home in time for The Simpsons. But what if there was some helpful navigational devices around? What if there were signs placed in certain points of the forest with a clear path towards home? The journey from point A to point B simple and easy.

Now relate that experience to the web—being lost in the woods is often the same principle. A random link or bookmark may drop someone off in the middle of a complex website. Poorly designed ones would leave that person stuck with nowhere to turn. On the other hand, sites with advanced navigational devices have clear signs pointing users in the right direction.

Navigation is key to any website—large or small. Pages need to have an easy way for people to move to another one within its site. At the very least, a link to the homepage allows users to start at the top. Without a homepage link (or any navigation whatsoever), the page is called a "dead-end page" because readers are locked out from the rest of the site [Lynch, 15].

A line from the Fraggle Rock song "Lost and Found" states: You don't know where you've been till you're homeward bound. That obscure reference is an accurate description of websites that force people to go to the top-level home and find their way back down again. It leaves people lost and confused. On the same lines, using a browser's Back button should only be a last resort because it forces them to retrace their steps out of the website, perhaps never to come back again [Sano, 86].

Where Am I?

Random web pages that all look similar provide little help in users knowing where they are. If a person has to ask "Where am I?" or "How did I get here?" then the site is an example of poor organization and navigation [Sano, 88; Marlatt]. When the structure is clear and presentable, people are more confident and can navigate to new information much faster. In simple terms, people cannot know where to go unless they know where they are.

Navigation Aids

There are many devices in use to facilitate navigation within a website. The sidebar, as seen on this site, has links to every top-level page as well as the homepage. They are unobtrusive and help people travel around sites [Waters, Universal Web Design, 44]. This aid is also typically seen horizontally on the top or bottom of pages. Some of the presentation styles that designers use include: text-only links, graphical links, highlights and animations when the mouse rolls over the words, drop-down lists, imagemaps and popup menus. Structurally, they usually consist of the highest level pages in the site's architecture.

Another term for one of these guiding aids is a navigation bar (nav bar for short). The one particular type that this experiment is testing is a hierarchical navigation bar. They are typically defined by the term "You Are Here" and list the structure of the site in such a way that users can see how to reach the current page from the homepage. They are ordered from broad to narrow topics. For example, a nav bar in a page about the Baltimore Orioles from a sports website would look similar to

It is a clear design that shows the navigation pathway. A user jumping straight to this page would know instantly where they were on the site and how to go back up to broader categories without needing to work their way down from the homepage (or use a search engine).

Some easily identifiable sites that use these nav bars are Yahoo!, C|Net, AOL.com, Netscape Netcenter and even the University of Maryland. They each use the bars in addition to other navigation aids (such as side and top bars) to give users a strong indication of their current location and how to go back to more general information without having to resort to going to the homepage. Logically, they are essential navigation aids for any website that people would travel into at random places.

As of this paper's writing, no experimental studies have been ever been written about these specific nav bars. There are many books and papers about website navigation and design, but they mostly discuss the fact that having any type of navigation aid is important. Of those few that mention nav bars, the only comment are that they are extremely useful and help users identify the hierarchy. They never address if it has been proven that nav bars help users identify their current location and answer the "where am I?" question. Do they help navigation by linking to direct ancestor levels of the current page? Or do they have no practical use and just waste screen space? This experiment attempted to answer those questions.

Example

What if a person follows a link in any search engine to end up at the clarinet section page of the Maryland Marching Band? How does that user find information on the saxophone section members? If there existed a link to the top-level School of Music page, they could follow links down from there. But how does anyone know if they are on the same website, especially if the colors and styles of the pages change? Or where to go from the main band website? With nav bars, a line similar to this could be displayed:

That bar would, in theory, help people know where they are on the site and how to back up. So to find the saxophones, clicking on Instruments, would most likely lead in the right direction without having to start from the homepage.

Usefulness

From informal questioning, most people actually do not look at nav bars. They feel more comfortable just going back to the homepage and working their way through the site. So to them, the bar is just a waste of valuable screen real estate. The first step in making navigation bars handy in practice is to teach users that they exist and are a valuable resource.
In the end, this experiment is trying to prove whether common sense works. It seems natural that a navigation bar would be useful, no matter what. Expert users could use it with ease in navigation. Beginning users would just ignore them. Is that really the case though? Or would it simply make the majority of web users happier to remove them and use that one line of screen space for other information? The results of this experiment will show if the navigation bars are truly useful or not.