4 Getting There
Pathway Pages
From home pages, let’s continue on to thinking about the content for your pathway pages.
The key message of this chapter is that your busy site visitors are trying to get to “the good stuff” – to whatever they are looking for – as quickly as possible. They don’t want to stop and read on the way. They are still navigating. They aren’t “there” yet.
In this chapter, we explore these eight points:
This chapter is mostly about structuring pathway pages. I touch on how to write links here, but you’ll find more about writing links in Chapter 12.
An information page can also be a pathway to related information or more details. We’ll consider those pages in the section on layering in Chapter 6.
Most site visitors are on a hunt – a mission – and the pathway is just to get them there
Think of people trying to find the information they are looking for as bloodhounds on a hunt. They try to pick up the “scent” of the information they are looking for and try to follow that “scent of information” to a successful end – the web page that has the information they want.
If a link gives off “good scent,” people feel confident that they are on the way to what they want. As Jared Spool shows in his report on Designing for the Scent of Information, measuring people’s confidence at each page on a pathway is a good way to tell if your links are working well for your web users.
See Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan on the scent of information. www.uie.com.
People don’t want to read a lot while hunting
While hunting (foraging) for information, people aren’t interested in reading. They are too busy trying to find their “food.” They are focused on the hunt. It’s only when they get to the right place – when the page says “here’s the information you came looking for” – that they switch modes from hunting to gathering and are ready to read, to take in the information.
The concept of “scent of information” comes from the work of Pirolli, Card, and their colleagues at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
The Xerox PARC researchers also talk about people as information foragers – sniffing our way through web sites, hunting for what we need. It’s an excellent metaphor for the behavior that we commonly see in usability testing.
Case Study 4-1 shows that most people want to read very little on pathway pages.
Case Study 4-1: What people do on pathway pages
The United States has no national registry for vital records such as birth certificates. To get a copy of your birth certificate, you must find the right office in the state where you were born – although many people do not realize that.
The U. S. government has a portal site that promises to link people to the right place for many needs. In a usability test of that site, we gave people the scenario: “You need a copy of your birth certificate, and a friend said you could get to the right place from this site.’
Every one of the 16 people in our usability test found the link they needed easily on the home page. They looked under Online Services for Citizens and clicked on Birth and Marriage Certificates.
At the time of the test, the portal site was called Firstgov.gov. In 2006, the name changed to USA.gov.
That brought up this web page:
What did people do on this page?
Most people clicked on B, often several times. They did this even though they were sophisticated web users and they all knew that gray meant the link was not available. Their need for their birth certificate overwhelmed the message that the gray B was sending.
What could we do to fix this page?
We could greatly improve the page with these three actions:
What happened?
The people who own this page could have solved the problem in several ways: a map or a drop-down box, for example. But the simplest way was a short instruction and a list of states – and that’s what they did.
What can we learn from this case study?
Here are a few take-aways that you might find relevant:
A pathway page is like a table of contents
You would not expect to see paragraphs of text mixed into a table of contents. You want to scan the table of contents to
That’s exactly what a pathway page is for – whether it is the path to information in a manual or to a section of an e-commerce site.
Figure 4-1, the pathway page for the Kids’ section of L.L.Bean.com, shows how you can give site visitors lots of options. On a pathway page such as this, be sure to use your site visitors’ words and group the items into categories that make sense to your site visitors.
The next level down in an e-commerce site may need short descriptions. See the next section of this chapter.
Tom Brinck and his co-authors use the term “scope notes” for these descriptions that add “scent” to the link. They also have a very useful table of the different ways that people navigate. See Brinck, Gergle, and Wood, 2002.
Figure 4-1 The pathway page helps customers move quickly to what they are looking for – no paragraphs to read and minimal marketing messages.
Sometimes, short descriptions help
If the links aren’t instantly obvious, a few words of description may help your site visitors find the link they need. Although people don’t want to read paragraphs of text or uninformative, welcoming marketing messages on pathway pages, they may want brief help in deciding which link to choose to move toward their goal.
The Coral Cay Conservation organization’s page in Figure 4-2 shows how you can use brief, informative descriptions with each link on a pathway page. The descriptions follow the links, and the links stand out on the page. They are not embedded in paragraphs.
Figure 4-2 The Coral Cay Conservation organization trains volunteers to collect scientific data to aid conservation. Its web site includes several pathway pages with brief descriptions to help site visitors choose the link they need.
On e-commerce sites, once people get to the area of the site with the type of product they are interested in, they begin to need some technical information to help them choose which products to consider further. Jared Spool calls this type of page a “gallery.” These pages may show a list of items or pictures of the options within the product category. As Spool points out, if it shows only the pictures, it doesn’t do enough to help most web users. That can also be true if it lists only the products by model numbers or series names.
See Spool’s article at www.uie.com/articles/galleries.
When you provide information to increase scent on a pathway page, put it in fragments or bullets – not long sentences or paragraphs. Make it useful information that your site visitors will find helpful in deciding how to move ahead. If you write only marketing hype, that’s not going to be useful. If you write technical specifications with the pictures, think carefully about whether your site visitors understand the technical language.
Figure 4-3, one of many gallery pages from Dell Computers’ web site, has both good features and places where it could be improved. The “help me choose” option leads to a page comparing the three notebook types on several questions. However, Dell might have done more to bring the users’ words in those questions onto this gallery page. The information on the page in Figure 4-3 doesn’t require a lot of reading, but the words it uses may not mean much to potential buyers.
Marketing is likely to be ignored on a pathway page
Short descriptions may help people choose well, but pathway pages are not the time for lengthy marketing messages. You market best when you help your site visitors have successful experiences. Most web users don’t want to stop to read even your friendly, welcoming messages while they are still hunting for the page they need.
Consider the pathway page in Figure 4-4. It tells home buyers and homeowners all about the various types of information and help they can get from FannieMae.com.
Figure 4-4 This is a pathway page. Its main message is “We don’t lend money directly to you to buy a house, but here are many ways we can help you with your mortgage needs.’
Even before getting to the page in Figure 4-4, people have to realize that Homepath is the link they need on the home page. They can’t click on For Home Buyers & Homeowners; that’s a non-clickable title. “Homepath” is an example of a made-up name that has very little “scent"; it’s not likely to mean anything to most people. Site visitors have to guess that it’s what they want if they want more information for home buyers and homeowners – and the only reason for that guess is that it’s the first link under the more informative title.
If people stay on this pathway page at all, they probably just skim through the links. As with the Aspen Square Hotel home page in Chapter 3, most of the page becomes a blur of words, as in Figure 4-5.
Figure 4-5 What many people see (and want) on a pathway page. There isn’t much informative content in the words surrounding the links.
Figure 4-6 might work much better as a pathway page to the information that Fannie Mae has for home buyers and homeowners.
The smoothness of the path is more important than the number of clicks (within reason)
Your site visitors want to get to what they need as quickly as possible. What’s the best way to help them do that? Does everything have to be no more than three clicks from the home page?
My answer is “No,” and my evidence is watching many hundreds of people work with web sites. The “three click rule” isn’t a rule; it’s a myth. Three is not a magic number. People will willingly go beyond three clicks if they are confident of the scent of the pathway they are on. In fact, if they are moving steadily on a successful path, they won’t realize if it took them four or five clicks rather than three.
A click or two more can indeed make a more successful site. Tom Brinck and his colleagues at Diamond Bullet Design revised a web site through a user-centered design process, taking it from an internal organization focus to a user-task focus. The information on the new site is typically one level deeper – requires one more click – but takes less than half the time to find!
| Old version | New version | |
|---|---|---|
| Task success | 72 percent | 95 percent |
| Average time to complete each task | 132 seconds | 50 seconds |
| Number of clicks to get to information: On average, 1 click more in new version | ||
Source: From a study by Tom Brinck and colleagues. www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-04.brinck.html.
Don’t make people think
People want to get to the right web page quickly and efficiently. If they have to stop and think about what to do at each step along the pathway, it’s not efficient – nor is it quick. They would rather click one or two more times than have to think along the way.
The wording and the guideline come from Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think! (Krug, 2005).
Keep people from needing the Back button
If the pathways aren’t smooth – if people can’t find the right link to move forward easily – they end up hopping part way down one path, back up to try another path, down that one, possibly back up again, and so on. Jared Spool calls this “pogo-sticking” – and both he and I find the people we watch utterly frustrated when they have to do this. If people use the Back button while trying to find information on your site, rethink your pathway pages.
Many people choose the first option that looks plausible
Humans don’t act optimally. As Herbert Simon pointed out many years ago, we “satisfice.” We trade off time for benefit – often without consciously realizing we are doing it. We make decisions based on what we see, without carefully exploring all the options.
Many busy web users click as soon as they see a link that looks like it might work for what they need. And the younger your web audience is, the more likely they are to jump to act.
Here are some implications of the realization that many people click on the first link they see that might help them:
Many web users who listen to the screen also choose the first option they hear that sounds reasonable. Older web users, however, tend to be more cautious clickers, looking over all the options before choosing. If you put the most important information and the links most people want high on the page, you’ll be helping all your web users.
Edith, the persona you met in Chapter 2, is an example of an older web user who is a cautious clicker.
Many site visitors are landing inside your site
For more on older adults as cautious clickers, visit www.aarp.org/olderwiserwired/oww-resources.
So far, we’ve focused on web users who come into your site at the home page and navigate down into the site through your pathway pages to the information they want. Certainly, some of your site visitors do that.
Nielsen and Loranger (2006, 27) found that “interior pages accounted for 60 percent of the initial page views.”
But many web users bypass those pages. In fact, on many web sites, more site visitors come through an external search engine than through the home page. That’s a reality. You have to assume that your information pages inside the site are also going to be the starting point for some of your web users.
Yet, I still see many web pages that are dead ends, like the Denver page about schedules for street sweeping in Figure 4-7.
Figure 4-7 When people have no sense of the web site to which a page belongs, they may wonder about the credibility of the page and of the entire site. All pages should share the web site’s global features.
Pages like this give people no clue as to what site they are on, where in that site they are, or how to get to the home page or to anywhere else in the site. Sites with pages like these are losing great opportunities to share all the other wonderful information or products they have with site visitors who come directly from an external search engine.
Every page in a site should have
It’s fine to make the logo and site name at the top active as links to the home page; many experienced web users expect that. However, that’s not enough. You also need a link that says “home” for those who don’t know to click on the logo or name. That can be either a text link or a tab, depending on how you set up your site’s global navigation.
If your part of the site is a subsite of a subsite, you may have several home pages going back up a pathway to the main home page. If so, label every “home” link clearly. I’ve watched usability test participants feel completely lost when a click on “home” takes them to a different home page than the one they expected.
Pages inside a site that have no connection to the rest of the site expose rifts within the organization to the outside world. They send the message that the people doing this part of the site don’t feel that they have to cooperate with the larger community of the organization. They indicate that no one is managing the larger organization’s site with enough clout to bring everyone together. The web content owner – and the organization – and the site visitors – all lose out on the value the web brings of connecting content in one place to relevant content elsewhere on the web site.
SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 4
Here are key messages from Chapter 4: