So, let's discuss a few specific concerns that you'll have to deal with when you, the information architect, creates the sitemap for your site. Let's talk about the number of clicks a user must perform before they get to content and how clicking compares to scrolling, and we'll also talk about how many choices to offer and what to call them. When I started out as a web designer in the early 2000's, there was this rule I heard a lot about, and that was that a user should be able to access every piece of content on a site with just two clicks. Less clicking can obviously benefit the user experience, they get things done much more quickly. Remember in those days, websites tended to load quite slowly, so every extra page that had to be loaded slowed the user down. But we shouldn't conclude that a lot of clicking is always a bad user experience, sometimes it might be wise to present a series of well-structured pages instead of one very complex page. To illustrate this, think about a site with many levels of information, a navigation with drop-down menus that go several layers deep allows your users to get around your site with very few clicks. For some sites, that might be the most appropriate but sometimes it might be better to simply provide a main level navigation which links to individual landing pages for each primary section. There, you can present the subsections with text describing what the user can expect, which of these options to choose could depend on your user's level of familiarity with the contents or how often they need to access a specific piece of information that's located deep in your site's architecture. If they have to click five times every time they access an important page, they will hope that they had some shortcut to get there, but a giant drop-down menu as indicated on the left can quickly overwhelm users that are less familiar with your site's content. Another example is designing a complex form. This could be presented all on one page, no clicking required, you just fill out the form and send it off. Another way to structure forms is to ask a few questions at a time. Look at the sketch on the right, doesn't this seem a lot more inviting than the onslaught of form fields on the left? Let's say you're developing a website to help people with their taxes. We could ask our user all questions on one page, everything from their name and their occupation and how much money they made and how many kids they have on and on, all on a single page. That would be similar to how such forms work on paper. But a form like this could be quite overwhelming for most users, and since we're working on a website, we could easily split up the form into many different screens and start simply by asking, what's your name? It might take the user 20 or 30 screens to complete the form, but each screen is now quite manageable. But let's say you are a tax expert and you know exactly which form fields you need to change, then it could get quite cumbersome to click through dozens of pages to find a specific field. So, to reiterate, having the user do a bunch of clicking isn't necessarily bad if you allow them to access information in a very structured way, it's only bad if it's cumbersome and repetitive. Clicking versus scrolling is a similar concern. There are some simple sites where everything can just be on one page. There's actually a whole category of websites called one-page websites. On those sites, you don't click much at all, they often work more like a narrative scrolling experience. Let me stress at this point that there's absolutely nothing wrong with scrolling, the web's foundation is based on the idea that pages scroll. So you don't have to be afraid of scrolling. You might still encounter clients who are concerned about this, they might tell you that they know for a fact that users hate scrolling, it's up to you to educate your clients. Think about the most popular websites, Facebook, Amazon Google Search, there is a lot of scrolling involved in navigating those sites. In fact, often it's easier to scroll than to click especially on a laptop with a trackpads or on touch screen devices. Think about a slideshow of images, if you built the interface around having to click little arrows to advance the slides, that's actually more difficult for the user than just presenting all images on one page and let the user scroll. That's probably the reason that Facebook and Instagram use the latter option to let users navigate through their friends posts. Let's continue with the question of how many choices to present to the user. Here's something that I have mentioned before, this idea that the human brain can hold about seven plus or minus two items in short-term memory. Once you add more items to a list,10,11,12, you will have forgotten what the first items were, and we can't make an easy decision. So, what does that mean for our information architecture? We should limit the amount of choices we present at one time to five to nine items. This is a nice rule for designing a main navigation, don't include 15 items, five to nine items is a good limit. If you have more content, your challenge will be how to categorize these items into subcategories that fit into a smaller amount of main categories. Here's a nice example of information overload. Look at the website of Chaffey College, it's completely overwhelming to make a decision here, there's just so much going on. On the right, in contrast, is the website for Columbia College. There's a much more limited set of options to choose from here, and there is a sense of clarity and sanity. Lastly, we have the question about what to call the choices, it's important to create clear and unambiguous labels that your target audience understands. A user doesn't want to guess what might happen when they click on a navigation item, you want them to click with confidence that they will find what they're looking for in this particular section of the site. However, a competing goal is often that you want to choose labels that are unique and not that generic, that can create friction if clarity suffers. Let's look at a few examples. Let say we are including a blog on our site, we could just call it blog and be done with it. It's a pretty well known term and users will expect it to be that part of the site where regular updates, writing and images are posted, but it's also a pretty broad label. Maybe you want to use something more unique and specific. Here are some other options, news, stories, what's happening, the latest, there's a website called slate.com and their blog is called The Slatest, pretty clever, right? The blog for Cal Arts, the College I'm teaching at, is called 24700 which is part of the address of the school, and if you're working on a snotty punk rock website, maybe their blog is called WTF. That's not appropriate for most websites but it could be quite appropriate for others. Again, much depends on your target audience. So, we're lucky that we already figured out who our users are at this point. Here's another one, shopping cart. That's a pretty standard term but it's not the only one. What about simply cart or bag or bin or basket, bucket, box or wallet? Again, it depends on the context of the project you're working on. How about the About Us page? Here are some other options that could be shortened to just about or be more precise as in about our company. Long labels though will be more difficult to deal with when you're designing their navigation bar. You could be super brief and just call the section us, or depending on the type of site, it could be team or behind the scenes, our crew, homies, you get the idea. Lastly, here's a question about which pronoun to use on your labels. One option is not to use a pronoun at all, as in simply account, but that's not all that friendly or specific is it. Do we call the section your account or is it my account? I'll let you spend a little bit more time with this interesting conundrum. I found a great post about just this question that I'd like you to read next.
