[GMU Redux] Decluttering navigation.
56! Wonderful number. 56 is also the number of links available on the gov.mu homepage without touching anything. These links make nearly 60-70 percent of the gross content of the home page. On a first view, it’s all about links and from a usability point of view, a visitor does not even spend the time reading all the available links on this page.
One of the great answers that some project managers are fond of is: “If they’re on this site, they’re looking for something, let them do the work now.” Here there is more to it. The visitor has to battle through the content to find data, if it ever finds it.
Decluttering the navigation is not easy task on this site. To be able to do this, we’ll keep in mind the main target for the site: the Mauritian population. Thus, the elements (as they are right now) must be organised in groups targetting the most used sections of the website. Having no access to the analytics tool of the site we cannot really know which sections are the more important. We can however make a guess on these.
Process.
How would this process be followed in a real life project?
- Use an analytics tool and make a report on a whole year.
- Targetting the main audience, extract information about the most viewed pages.
- Determine what are the completed goals for these pages (downloading a file, filling a contact form, filing a report or a demand…)
- Check if there are any conversions or determine how to follow them in the tracking.
- Use these pages as a base for navigation, at least section building.
- Determine section groups and target landing pages as main section pages
One navigation menu or more?
Looking into the navigation system actually used on the site as well as the sub-portals, the site’s overall navigation is separated into 5 parts dispersed around the page. Below is a screenshot of all the other navigational elements.
A good experimentation would be to group all the main navigation in one place and keep one and only one for less-important links such as disclaimers and “about” pages. On the main navigation, experimenting with mega menus might be the best alternative to the clutterred navigation problem. This would add direct links to specific pages in one place and improve user experience.
The mega menu would have to be above the fold and the second “lesser” navigation in the page footer.
Another interesting experimentation to hold on navigation on this website would be to display a block of information by topic to help finding the information instead of using the drop down menus currently in use.
How to link?
A very important problem crops up when analysing the links. All the bottom page ones are javascript links. Being a government website, the most important factor in the use of the website is easy navigation. Using javascript generated links is one of the worse errors to make in web implementation for 2 main reasons:
- Non visual browsers will have problems following them as they are non-javascript readers. An “accessibility” link written in javascript shows that accessibility is actually NOT the main objective of a site that needs to have the largest audience possibilities.
- Search engines will not be able to crawl the pages. SEO (from a business-oriented point of view) might not be a core necessity for such a site but it is important because SEOing it will allow it to have direct links available in search engine results pages, these being what drives people to the information they are looking for.
It is therefore important to check all the links and set them in href (HTML). Furthermore, adding title attributes to them would improve the SEO and facilitate navigation. Anchor texts with keywords will also help navigation as well as SEO in one go.
Conclusion
Navigation is a core element of user experience and experimenting with better content delivery on a site like a Government’s website would be beneficial to all. Improving and decluttering this will have a positive impact on browsing. Experimenting with different solutions to find the best one would not be throwing money out of the window.
Let’s talk about this…
What is your navigation experience of this site? Do you find it easy to browse? Have you ever used it to find information? Tell us about your browsing experiences or encounters on the government website.
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Category: Design, GMU Redux 2010, Management, Other, Standards
