IDYeah Usability Blog: Structure Principle

STRUCTURE.

In my blog post, Principles of User Interface Design, we touched on various aspects of user interfaces. This feature will discuss few specific points of one of the aspects - Structure - followed by few examples.

Why do you need your site to be structured?

Well, you need your customers/prospects to understand quickly what need of theirs will your product/service fulfill. It is important for the visitors to find relevant information quickly, and get easy access to additional information if necessary. Your public domain, which is the place for introducing all that you do, can and will change in the future. Having a good and expandable structure would make this job easy and seamless. Having a good structure (which also means not random, but structured set of keywords) will also make the site findable on search engines. The customer also needs to have alternate paths to key areas and information on the site for better decision-making.

How can you achieve structure in your web site?

Main idea is to establish the information architecture for site content areas in providing clear, visitor-specific paths to useful and relevant information.

Internal site linking structure - have logical grouping/linking between main navigational elements (either left or top) and secondary/direct navigation (right, center, or bottom).

Linking between sections - have good cross-linkages and quick jumps to important sections of your site (for example: customer stories, case studies, thought-leadership blogs).

Page-specific navigation - it is not a bad idea to design page-specific navigation and access to information. In fact, each page has to serve a specific purpose and it's a mistake to have all pages behave the same in a large site. For example, "About us" section needs to be very different than a section about "Products/Services" not just in presentation and writing style, but also in flow.

Keywords as sections - site visitors will feel at home with the structure of the site, if we make user keywords as section names.

Site Exits - design specific click-to-action elements for a logical exit from your site. For example: Inquiry Forms, Downloads, Feedback, Sign-ups, Share/Like.