Specials vs. Special Reports though….man, I thought that was going to be a link to buy a CNN t-shirt or coffee mug.

I don’t know if they did, but adding title attributes would have helped some.

What do you think about that?

Lots of times people never even noticed the right column. We even tried tricks like promulgating a light yellow background in the right column if there were navigational elements in it, in the hopes of getting people to notice it. Didn’t work.

(Boy, I’d loved to have had eye tracking technology back then!)

Seems like we were working against the expectations of users, of course, who expected major navigation elements to be on the top or left and “soft” items to be in the right. So all in all, I’d shy away from navigational elements on the right, especially those that are coupled to navigational elements on the left. You also get into accessibility issues with screen magnifiers, tab orders and the like.

So that’s my 2 cents.

I sometime do include a horizontal menu with only a few (3-5 items) that are very broad. I also put some content area that are about the same 3-5 items that are in the horizontal menu. Once the user arrives at an internal page, I have the horizontal menu show which item the user is in and I also put a “secondary” menu on the right side.

What do you think about that?

We all need to decide on site navigation methods/techniques for the sites we design and maintain. So, how do we determine the “current best practices” for site navigation? Eventually, repeat visitors figure out the navigation logic used on the levels within a site. This is immediately apparent when we change that logic.

Is it possible to have “current best practices” for site navigation? Does that also depend on the type of site (i.e., newspaper, large government, retail, etc.)?

Thanks for any feedback on this question.

We’ve identified two significant challenges in addition to the ones mentioned in the article. First, how does the navigation respond when the user increases the text size? Second, where does the secondary navigation belong?

To address the first, we’re probably going to go with an em-based layout so that the nav container grows along with the text size, ensuring the links don’t force a line-break or push a choice off the screen entirely. For the second issue, we decided that it’s important that users be able to quickly access secondary pages from anywhere on the site, so a drop-down menu of links will appear on hover/activation. We’re still trying to decide whether that second list should be vertically- or horizontally-oriented. And of course we need that secondary nav to be displayed on section pages. A right-hand column will be used for that, letting us use much longer link titles than the horizontal nav will allow.

More specifically, this issue digs at the notion that a certain subset of options needs to be in the navigation bar to begin with. This would be a good idea, if the navigation bar was the primary means of getting to content. This would be a bad idea if designers tried to put everything in the navigation bar…remember the two-level Amazon navigation bars of years ago? Those didn’t last long.

So the real question, I think, is this: what purpose does the navigation bar serve? Our research has suggested that navigation bars are actually support systems for sites and not the primary way people get to content. The primary way is to look in the body of whatever page they’re on. Failing that, users fall back onto navigation bars and search to help them out. This suggests that navigation bars tend to be a less optimal solution than their name suggests.

So to that end I would suggest exploring putting section-specific content somewhere on the page, perhaps in a sidebar on the right of the page(for example). This way, the designers could even include story headers in addition to the section name, very much like what they do at the bottom of pages now. ( http://www.cnn.com/TECH/ ). However, the problem with putting it at the bottom of pages like in this example is that there is a tremendous amount of non-content between the story blurb and the section-navigation. Whitespace and ads take up several hundred pixels of room that probably won’t induce people to scroll…users need a reason to scroll! Making a smoother transition through this area on the page might help that happen more easily.

I would be very interested in learning about the research that went into this decision (both visitor metrics and usability findings).

Did the visitor metrics show that only a very small percentage of users visiting CNN have their resolutions set to 800×600, justifying the leap to 1024×768?

The advertisers must have been consulted, since any users visiting CNN at a resolution of 800×600 no longer see the advertisements in the right pane.

Were the old and new versions usability tested and the results compared? If so, what were the findings?