Goodbye Menu Navigation
"Ok, grab a clean sheet of paper and let's write down everything we want in our new demo website."
"What's paper?"
That's not the exactly the way the meeting started, but you get the point. Technology is changing so fast, some days it is difficult to keep track of what is available and what is not. Thrive IM is in the beginning of designing the next generation YMCA website. A group of us were gathered around the conference room trying to beat John to the pizza.
On the wall we were staring at the existing demo site on the 60" monitor. The problem we were discussing was navigation and sub-navigation. From a user's perspective, how should the navigation flow? What is the most logical progression that would let the site visitor find the information they needed in the most efficient manor? Horizontal navigation or vertical? Fanned sub-nav or accordion?
"I think we are looking at this from the wrong perspective. We already know that traffic to YMCA websites is mirroring traffic to other sites. More than 50% of existing website traffic to YMCA websites now comes from smartphones and tablets. The question we should be asking is how can consumers find the content they seek on a smartphone?"
And suddenly the answer was there. Search. Voice search. You reach your local YMCA site and have a choice. Start reading menu options and clicking on the navigation icon you "think" will reveal the answer, or...
Tap the microphone icon and ask the web site "When does summer camp start?" And almost instantly your smartphone takes you to the information you want on your local YMCA website . Almost Watson-like, it reports "there is a 93% chance that the answer you seek is Friday, June 13th. Would you like to register now?"
Sometimes we forget that a smartphone is still a phone.
William Horvath II Great points, thanks for sharing. I think your idea of opening a search box is one way to tackle the problem, while maintaining confidentiality. However, we are in the age of natural progression. Those who are comfortable using it will have the option to do so. The menu navigation will continue to be available for the foreseeable future, but the migration to mobile will eventually uncover someone smarter than I who will figure this out. After all it worked on Star Trek - "Computer - what is the..."
As nifty as this idea is, I think it's unwise to make search-by-voice your primary means of navigation. Let's put aside for the moment all the challenges with natural language processing, interpreting foreign accents, and localization (try asking Siri to give you directions to anything in Maumee.) As a general rule, I despise voice-driven interfaces, because they expose what I'm doing to everyone in range of my voice. This is especially problematic at the office: If I say "When does summer camp start?" out loud, the guy in the cube across from me will say "Are you talking to me?". I'll say "No"...and the system (as described above, anyway) will assume that I don't want to register for the camp. And that's the tip of the iceberg. What will unintended listeners think when I want to search for some of the Y's more sensitive services, for example help with domestic abuse or therapeutic services? And how should I hold the phone? If I put it up to my ear, I won't be able to see the results; or I'll end up waving my arm back and forth as I try to find what I'm looking for. If you want to explicitly avoid any kind of navigational menu, you should probably just put up a search box, with instructions for the user to tell you what they're looking for. This is how Apple's iPhone and Spotlight features work, and they're terrific in that respect.