One of the things that makes ewu.edu so difficult to navigate is the fact that left navigation constantly changes. It can make for an interesting game of hunt-and-peck when you’re trying to find content on our site.
In some cases this style of navigation is okay — but on a site like ours where a sense of place/destination is critical for usability, it can create problems. I applaud Ingeniux for the clever way of auto-generating navigation in this manner. However, with the redesign we’ll be striving to adjust how our left navigation works.
As an example, here are a couple screen shots from our current site:
1.) Main academics page
2.) Undergraduate academics page
Notice how the left nav totally changes? If anyone wanted to look at the Programs A to Z Index from the Undergraduate page, they’d have a tough time doing so! In fact, they’d most likely have to leave the page and go back to the original academics landing page in order to get there.
Now check out a different left nav approach:
1.) Gap Women’s homepage
2.) Gap Women’s jeans page
Notice how the other left nav items are maintained even though the user has drilled down into Jeans? This allows the user to continue to freely navigate throughout the site without having to think hard about how to trace their steps back out of the path they chose.
In the redesign, one of the challenges we’re facing is to create a left nav much like what you see immediately above. Once you’ve navigated to a main topic on the site, that left nav should essentially remain the same. Organizing our site’s content into logical sections that the user can identify with rather than by the structure of the University is critical to the success of this tactic. This is a big challenge for a site like EWU’s (indeed, it’s one of the reasons this project is more than just a redesign and more like a reorganization) just because we have sooooo much content out there. But the fact that we have so much content should only reinforce the need for reliable navigation.
This strategy may require each unit in the university to think a little harder about the navigation on their site. But thinking a little harder about it so our website users are happier will make things easier on us all in the long run.
