Navigation Systems

The Griffith Homepage

For this week's blog, I've chosen to assess Griffith.

More specifically, its navigation bar.

Link’s Label	Destination’s Heading	Destination’s <title>
Navigation Bar
Future students	Future students	Future students – Griffith University
Current students	Students	Students – Griffith University
Staff	Staff Services and Resources	Staff Services and Resources – Griffith University
About Griffith	About Griffith	About Griffith – Griffith University
Research	Research	Research – Griffith University
Alumni	Development and Alumni	Development and Alumni – Griffith University
Other Links
Griffith Portal	Griffith Portal	Griffith Intranet Portal
Contact us	Contact us	Contact us – Griffith University

Now to enumerate the issues – to start, the colour of the navigation bar, the placement of its elements, and even the text within the search box are all different depending on the area of the site.

The ‘Griffith Portal’ seems to be a completely different website; it omits the navigation bar, and the <title> doesn’t follow the standard ‘[site area] – Griffith University’ structure which is generally consistent across most of the site.

Some of the naming is a bit spotty, ‘Alumni’ changes to ‘Development and Alumni’, ‘Staff’ to ‘Staff Services and Resources’, ‘Current Students’ to just ‘Students’. More pedantically, the ‘S’ in ‘Future students’ is lower case, but the ‘G’ in ‘About Griffith’ is capitalised.

Griffith has a few discrepancies, but the nav bar and headings are relatively consistent and logical throughout. Some work could be done towards improving consistency, but for the most part the labels get their destination’s purpose across.

QUT

The QUT nav bar

I’ll also assess the navigation bars of some competing sites. I’ll start with QUT.

Link’s Label	Destination’s Heading	Destination’s <title>
Navigation Bar
Study	Study	QUT – Study
Research	Research	QUT – Research
Industry	Industry and partnerships	QUT – Industry and partnerships
About	About	QUT – About
Alumni	Alumni	QUT – Alumni
Giving	Giving	QUT – Giving
International students	International Students	QUT – International Students
Other Links
News	News	QUT – News
Jobs	?	QUT | Jobs at QUT
Library	Library	QUT | Library
Contact	Contact	QUT – Contact
Current Students	Student gateway	Home – QUT Students
Current Staff	Staff gateway	Home – QUT Staff

At a glance, it seems QUT is more consistent in its navigation bar; the only name change is ‘Industry’ being changed to ‘Industry and partnership’, which is forgivable given the new name adds important information but would be too long to fit in the nav bar.

The discrepancies start to show in the ‘Other Links’; with ‘Jobs’, ‘Library’, ‘Current Students’ and ‘Current Staff’, the <title> structure changes. Even the nav bar changes across these particular areas of the site; some of the elements change to be more pertinent to the current area of the site. Current Students, for example, displays information regarding enrolment and fees.

The majority of the nav bar is consistent; it’s mostly the ‘Other Links’ which need work. While the changes in the nav bar might be confusing if you forget which area of the site you’re on, they generally go towards streamlining the experience. The most inconsistent area of the site is the ‘Jobs’ section, which looks like a completely different website.

QUT is pretty good; the nav bar doesn’t change amongst any of the main links in the nav bar, and the headings are logical and consistent. One of the main issues with QUT is the change in the nav bar in some of the ‘Other Links’, although it does aim to streamline a user’s experience, and so might prove beneficial.

UQ

The UQ nav bar

And finally, we get to UQ.

Link’s Label	Destination’s Heading	Destination’s <title>
Navigation Bar
ABOUT	About UQ	About The University of Queensland, Australia
NEWS	UQ News	UQ News Online – The University of Queensland
FUTURE STUDENTS	Courses and Programs	Courses and Programs – The University of Queensland, Australia
UQ JOBS	UQ JOBS	UQ Jobs – The University of Queensland, Australia
TEACHING & LEARNING	Teaching & Learning at UQ	Teaching and Learning at UQ – The University of Queensland, Australia
RESEARCH	Research at UQ	Research at UQ – The University of Queensland, Australia
ALUMNI	Alumni & Community	Alumni – The University of Queensland, Australia
INTERNATIONAL	UQ International	UQ International – The University of Queensland, Australia
Other Links
CONTACTS	UQ Contacts	Contacts – The University of Queensland, Australia
SEARCH	UQ Search	UQ Search Home
STUDY	Courses and Programs	Courses and Programs – The University of Queensland, Australia
MAPS	UQ Maps	UQ Maps – The University of Queensland, Australia
NEWS	UQ News	UQ News Online – The University of Queensland
EVENTS	UQ Events	UQ Events, The University of Queensland
LIBRARY	UQ Library	Home Page | UQ Library
MY.UQ	Current Students	my.UQ Student, The University of Queensland

There seems to be no convention to the <title> or the page’s heading. Some of the links are redundant; the ‘News’ link in ‘Other Links’ is the same as the one in the ‘Navigation Bar’. Moreover, the nav bar changes between pretty much every page. Take the ‘FUTURE STUDENTS’ section as an example.

The nav bar is different; however it displays more pertinent links, which aim to streamline the experience. The heading is ‘Courses and Programs’ which is a completely different naming convention. Furthermore, take note of the ‘UQ JOBS’ section.

The nav bar has changed again; moreover, even the heading font has changed. ‘UQ’ is more graphical than it is on any of the other pages which also have ‘UQ’ in their heading.

UQ, is generally inconsistent. Their nav bar is different for every area of the site. As with QUT, one might argue that the inconsistencies in the nav bar are to facilitate a streamlined user-experience. Having said this, most of the issues are due to carelessness – not abiding by a titling structure, for example; often, the heading labels aren’t the same as the link leading to the page.

Summary

The labelling systems of the sites vary; they talk about the same subjects, but lead you through them differently. UQ for example focuses on subsections of the current area of the site, while both Griffith and QUT tend to show broad areas with links therein.

I'd have to conclude that out of the three, QUT is the victor. While Griffith remains consistent, barring some 'special' areas such as the Griffith Portal, most of its inconsistencies seem unintentional. UQ is far too sporadic to be considered, and while QUT is also inconsistent in some areas, it's typically intentional and aims to aid navigation.

Information Architecture

Users will tend to avoid websites which have poor layouts, or which are hard to navigate. An Information Architect seeks to avoid such problems by organising and structuring content such that it is simple to navigate and easily accessible.

One e-commerce company found that its poor layout was proving quite costly; through usability tests, it found that many customers didn’t complete their purchase because they had to register to the site beforehand. After changing the checkout process so that registration wasn't required, there was a sizable surge in revenue, so much so that it's now referred to as the ‘$300 million button’.

People mostly notice poor information architecture; something which is poorly structured, such that information is inaccessible. Similar to a house without a toilet, a user will get frustrated if they can't find something they're looking for on a website, which will hinder their attitude towards the site. Good information architecture involves clear labelling, logical and consistent navigational structures. Good information architecture sits in the back of people’s minds; it gives the user the confidence that as they navigate the site, they edge closer to what they’re searching for.

Collation

A key part of Information Architecture is logically organising content, which is referred to as collation; to do so, you need to know when to arrange something alphabetically, chronologically, or by some other order. Context is a key part of deciding the order of a list; even when organising something alphabetically, there’s ambiguity as to what goes where. Take the following list as an example:

ASCII Code Chart

• El Paso, Texas
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• The Lord of the Rings
• Newark, New Jersey
• XVIIme siècle
• .38 Special
• St. Louis, Missouri
• New York, New York
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• Albany, New York
• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• The Hague, Netherlands
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Plzen, Czech Republic

There are some things to think about when ordering a list alphabetically:

• Should you put ‘The Hague’ under ‘T’ or ‘H’? Typically, you would omit words like ‘The’ or ‘A’ when ordering a list, but in this case it’s a part of the name and so should probably be included.
• Likewise, would ‘El Paso’ be under ‘E’ or ‘P’? ‘El’ is Spanish for ‘The’, so it should probably be treated similarly. Normally, it'd be omitted, but again, it’s part of the name; people likely wouldn’t search for ‘Paso’ when they mean ‘El Paso’.
• A more difficult question is whether to put New York before Newark. Does the space count as a character? Alphabetically, not counting spaces or capitals, ‘Newark’ would come first. However, the order would probably depend on the context; if I were enumerating a list of places in the world, doing it by hand would be time-consuming, so I would probably be using some kind of automated process. As such, I would probably use some character set such as ASCII; in ASCII, both the space and ‘Y’ come before ‘a’, so ‘New York’ would come first.
• Does ‘St.’ come before or after ‘Saint’? ‘St.’ is an abbreviation of ‘Saint’, so should they be ordered as the same word? It’s hard to decide, and again depends on the context. I would probably order ‘St’ as ‘Saint’, as uniformity is key in organisation. As such, St. Louis would come before Saint Nicholas.
• How are numbers, punctuation and special characters handled? What’s their order? Are they counted at all? I would use the characters’ ASCII values; that way, I could write a program to alphabetise the list for me.

Having considered all of this, here is my interpretation of the alphabetised list:

• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• .38 Special
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• Albany, New York
• El Paso, Texas
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• New York, New York
• Newark, New Jersey
• Plzen, Czech Republic
• St. Louis, Missouri
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• The Hague, Netherlands
• The Lord of the Rings
• XVIIme siècle

If the italic elements are books and the rest places, the list could be separated to display the different context between the elements. Moreover, if the places are those which I’ve visited, and the books are those which I’ve read, chronology could be used to order the list(s). Chronologically ordering the lists would let you see at a glance what happened most recently, what's happened furthest in the past, and the order of events. This would reduce the ambiguity inherent with alphabetisation and would also give a personal meaning to the list.

There are more rigid and uniform methods of alphabetisation; this document details a technical standard for Unicode collation.