Rube Goldberg: Information Architect?
Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist known for his intricate and elaborate single panels that depicted simple tasks being performed in a complicated, tortuous fashion.
Goldberg may have died in 1970, but our fascination with the types of devices generated by his fertile brain has accelerated in the Internet age. Go to Youtube, type Rube Goldberg in the search box and welcome yourself to time-kill central.
Check out this video that was the result of a content hosted by chocolatier Cadbury as a part of its “Crème That Egg” promotion:
As diverting as these videos are, watching what should be a one-step task divided a hundred times or more, Rube Goldberg should not be your inspiration when you are mapping out the navigation for your website.
You can make it easy or hard for people to get where they want to, depending on what you want them to take away, but the one thing you don’t want them to leave with is a suitcase full of frustration.
Five iron-clad rules for site navigation:
1. Make it easy for people to contact you. The “Contact Us” link should be on every page. Put it where you want, footer, top nav, wherever, but make sure it’s a logical spot.
2. Make it easy for people to learn more about you. One of the first things I usually do when I stumble across a new site is see who’s behind it. If there’s no “About Us” page or it’s sparsely populated, my interest plummets. I know the Internet allows anonymity, but it’s not a trust builder.
3. Site search should be on every page. It’s a gateway into more of your content and allows the visitor a degree of control. It’s a win-win.
4. Don’t leave people hanging. If you’ve just had them read an inspiring story, many visitors are going to wonder how they can do more. Have a strong call to action that fulfils this need. It made me nuts yesterday when I read a moving story on the New York Times about a family who had a child battling cancer and was struggling to find health insurance and there was no way listed to contact the family or contribute to help them out. I was able to send a message to the article’s author, but got an auto-reply stating that I may not receive a response. Bad New York Times, bad! If you’re going to be too busy to respond to feedback, don’t accept it at all or warn me beforehand. But don’t let me spend my time writing something and then tell me my message went straight to email purgatory. UPDATE 4/21/09—New York Times national correspondent Kevin Sack wrote back and supplied the information I was looking for. Shaming of NYT is hereby retracted. Rule number 4 still stands.
5. Don’t waste people’s time. See item #4.
You can make it as easy or as hard as possible for people to get what they want on your site. Consider carefully the ramifications of making it too hard. We may sit through a 10-photo slideshow that has each photo on a separate page so you can increase your click count, but waste too much of our time and it’s time for “Adieu.”
— Jonathan
April 24th, 2009 at 6:40 am
Its important that you make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for. When designing websites I always make sure that my navigation is clear and easy to see so and is in the same place so people can easily navigate round my sites and found what they are looking for.