An Icon too far

David Dorn comes across textless, icon-based links on Web pages and gets the PIP

Have you come across these sites? Very swish and modern, but an absolute pig to navigate. They're 'designed' by folks who have this weird idea about style over function, and seem to hate the very idea of signposting the various sections of the Webs that weave - and oh, what tangled webs they can be!

Let me give you some examples:

Have a look at http://www.moma.org/workspheres/ and click the 'enter' link (it's tiny, you may not find it first time. Then try to work out what's going on!

Or have a look at http://www.sbt.siemens.com/ where there's a lovely array of sepia toned links that mouse-over to full colour, but go absolutely nowhere!

And then there's http://www.fujifilm.com/ which sports an array of picture links right across the top of the page - with no clue as to what they're linking to. Even if you read the status bar, the links just go to 'story6.html' and the like.

Finally - for the moment - have a look at http://www.utena.net/. There's a whole line of iconic links there, and the only way to see what's going on is to check the status bar to see where they point. Oh, be warned, once you've clicked, there seems to be no obvious way of getting back to the home page other than clicking the back button in your browser. Clever that!

Standards

Now that you've checked those sites out, you'll know what I mean when I call this 'Pig In a Poke' [PIP] navigation - you've no idea what you're going to get when you click a link. There are standards, though, that might look like PIP nav, but aren't really.

For instance, it's an accepted standard that the company logo at the top left of the page is usually a link to take you back to the home page - that's certainly the case on Practical PC, where every PPC logo you see at the top left of your screen takes you back to the PPC Welcome page.

It's also pretty much accepted that a left facing arrow icon takes you back a step in a series of pages, while a right facing arrow icon takes you to the next logical page in the series. It's generally a good idea to have such links at both the top and bottom of the page, too, and the 'back' icon at the left. Yes, I've seen them transposed, so the link at the right takes you back, while the link at the left takes you forward.

That's what our colonial cousins call 'Counter Intuitive' - or to put it simply, just doesn't make sense. Let's be honest, designing a website is all about intuitive usage. The idea, I would have thought, is to make it as easy for your reader to navigate his or her way around the site, in a way that's immediately obvious.

Intuitive

For me, that means text - descriptive text, and, possibly, alternative navigational tools. If you can think of two ways of navigating the site, include them both - don't toss a coin to choose between two navigational methods - use them both.

If that means that a top navigation bar is duplicated in function by a left side navigation bar, that's fine. If they're both text-based, they'll be quick enough to load. And if you consistently create pages that extend 'below the fold' (that means that they're deeper than the maximum depth of a browser at a full screen resolution of 800x600 or 1024x768) put a bottom nav bar in as well.

That way, readers don't have to whiz back up to the top of the page to find their way to another section of your site. At the very least, put a 'top' link in so they've got an easy back to the navigation.

But, coming back to these PIP nav sites, I've got to say that they really are too much! Funnily enough, they tend to coincide with rather more usage of Flash and Shockwave than is strictly good for you - or your modem, at any rate. Yet another sign of form over function.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish they'd keep designers away from Web sites and let us simple folk get on with it - we don't all like the Diarmuid Gavin approach to designer gardening. Sometimes, we just want to stick with plain old Titchmarsh!

 

David Dorn