User Interface Engineering

Back in April I wrote about the challenges of moving to a horizontal navigation scheme, using CNN’s recent redesign as an example. They’ve since updated their site, so I thought I would highlight the changes.

Back then, designers at CNN were tackling some of the common issues we have to consider when making such a move: how many links to include, which links to include, and how long to make each link. One of the decisions the CNN designers made was to put several links in a dropdown menu instead of placing them in the horizontal nav bar. Here is what it looked like:

Well, recently they’ve gotten rid of the dropdown that contained extra links. I had mentioned that these types of flyouts were troublesome to people. Perhaps CNN found the same…here is what the homepage looks like now:

CNN now has a full-width 980 pixel-wide horizontal nav bar, with 19 links! That’s a lot of links! (this is up from 17 links in the April design). They’ve added three links (”analysis”, “offbeat”, and “exchange”) and removed one (”video”).

These slight changes in the design aren’t surprising. Many design teams are moving away from full redesigns and moving toward incremental improvements, evolving a design instead of recreating it. This seems like a good approach for CNN. They have so many people using the site that a day’s worth of usage is probably enough to let them know if something isn’t working. And apparently, their old navigation wasn’t working…

It will be interesting to see how it mutates in the future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 7:59 am and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.