Last week I had to venture into a well-known furniture store to pick up a new desk to accommodate the growing team at White Hat Media. In my haste, I picked up the wrong size desk and had to go through the tedious rigmarole of returning the first item before collecting the second. I had a little trouble locating the Returns desk. It got me thinking about store layouts, and how customers need signposts, and what happens when someone decides to take a shortcut. Exactly the same thought processes are needed for designing navigation on your website.
I arrived at the store and I knew where I wanted to go, but there were no obvious signs so I had to ask inside. The helpdesk told me I needed to go to Returns at the other end of the store, but I was immediately confronted by a "No Entry" sign in the direction I needed to go. So I had to go back outside to go in through a different door.
In the Returns area, instead of the normal queue I was expecting, I had to figure out which button to press to get a ticket from a machine with a number on for when I could be seen. In Steve Krug's terminology, too many question marks were bashing me over the head!!
Anyway, having returned the wrong desk, I was faced with having to go all the way back through the store to get to the section I needed to collect another desk. I already knew where it was, so I decided to do my own thing, to be a rebel - I went the wrong way through the checkout. How daring! At any moment I expected to be grabbed by security and thrown out for bucking their system. I wasn't of course, but it got me thinking about user journeys.
People are basically idiosyncratic, more like cats doing their own thing than sheep following the flock. They go where they want to go. Website navigation is the same. No matter how carefully thought out your site navigation is, people will find other ways to get to what they want. People don't mind guessing once or twice and choosing a wrong option, but if the choices are not obvious, users can quickly get lost, frustrated and leave your site.
Having a clear navigation on your site is just as important as the "shiny" homepage design and interesting content. People won't use your website if they can't find their way around. Your homepage is also important as it is a fixed point, a reality checkpoint, like the lampost in Narnia! While the navigation can often be unique on a homepage, it shouldn't be so different as to be unrecogniseable from anywhere else in the site.
With the ever increasing reach of Google's indexing, you can't be certain users will always enter by your homepage. Sometimes you may not want them to if you have a specific landing page for a particular site. However, once a user has arrived on your site, it needs to be easy for them to find what they are looking for, or they will leave. The one constant on any site is the big X in the top corner of the browser. When frustration level reaches the critical point because someone has landed in the shoes section but was actually looking to buy a mankini and can't work out how to get from one section to another, that big X, or if you're lucky the back button, become the most frequent clicks on your site.
I'm rambling. I do that. But my point is this; don't worry about where users enter your site. Just make sure once they're in there, they can find their way around easily and can have a happy experience navigating through, this will ensure they come back to your site, and not one your competitors'.
