Menu Design Study #29
These Menu prototypes are Best understood if you run your mouse over the menu items.
Linger as you hover, to see pop out text.
You should also click one or more menu items then click back to see a "visited" link's color shift.
More important than even look and feel, the most critical
consideration in web site design is: how will your
customers navigate it? It's your job to make sure your
customers can find what they seek on your web site.
This means menus and menu design.[1]
If you have only a few things to say, then your site has a great many
options. When your message involves 10-300 pages, or more, it gets a
lot more complex.
This site presents a couple of navigation strategies available to you
with different looks and feel, all with the same outline structure we
associate with hard drives, files and folders. I like it because most of
your customer's will have already learned to locate things on their own
computers that way, and it's actually pretty logical. That's not the only way
to organize a site, but it's one I like.
Outline Menu's help your customer get where they wish to go quickly, because
they already know how to use an outline.
However sometimes you want them to slow down. In these cases, you'll want to create
a user interface that forces them to learn how to use the site, exposing them
to your artful presentations for additional fractions of seconds as they take the time to learn your
navigation strategy. These navigation strategies are applicable to fad
products and high margin goods and services like Law, Medicine, and art.
In general, I like Menu's that change in some way to let you know when you're
hovering on a hot link, and hot links that let you know you've already been
there. These menus do both for advanced browsers, although older browsers
won't get all of the features.
Due to the differences in the capabilities of various generations of the
popular Web browsers (Netscape, 3, 4, 6, 7; Internet Explorer 3, 5, 6; AOL 3,
4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.) and less popular browsers (Mozilla, Opera, HP
Macintosh) if you are planning to do bleeding edge graphics and animations on
your site, you may need to build a simple site to go along with your fancy
site, and detect each incoming web surfer, re-directing each one to a
version of your entire site that works for them.
Building a good menu design is vital to helping the person who comes to your site fine what they seek.
There are as many theories on what makes for a good menu, as there are web designers. To me they are:
Easy to Understand
No Learning Curve
Easy to Use
Easy to Maintain.
I like to have a hot link change color when I've gone to that page, but that's not always the best strategy. Old pages get updated, and good pages have
multiple included links beyond one or two.
[1] I will spare you my rant on most Graphical User Interface
(GUI) Designs and Deigners. Perhaps it will suffice to say that I'm not impressed.
