Site Design: Introduction (Part 2)

Hierarchy
Any organization needs a hierarchy of importance, if only to determine basic navigation structures for the user. Most "chunks" of information can and should ranked in importance, and organized by the degree of interrelationship among units. Once you have determined a logical set of priorities, you can build a hierarchy from the most important or most general concepts, down to the most specific or optional topics. Hierarchical organizations are virtually a necessity on the Web, because most home page-and-link schemes depend on hierarchies, moving from the most general overview of your site (your home page), down through submenus and content pages that become increasingly more specific.

Relationships
When confronted with a new and complex information system users begin to build mental models, and then use these models to assess relationships among topics, and to make guesses about where to find things they haven't seen before. The success of your Web site as an organization of information will largely be determined by how well your actual organization system matches your user's expectations. A logical site organization allows users to make successful predictions about where to find things. Consistent methods of grouping, ordering, labeling, and graphically arranging information allow users to extend their knowledge from pages they have visited to pages they are unfamiliar with. If you mislead users with a structure that is not logical (or have no comprehensible structure at all), users will be constantly frustrated by the difficulties of find their way around. You don't want your user's mental model of your site to look like this:

Function
After you have created your site, you should analyze its aesthetics, and the practicality and efficiency of your organizational scheme. No matter what organizational structure you choose for your Web site, proper World Web site design is largely a matter of balancing the structure and relationship of menu or "home" pages and individual content pages or other linked graphics and documents. The goal is to build a hierarchy of menus and pages that feels natural to the user, and doesn't interfere with their use of the Web site or mislead them.

Web sites tend to grow almost organically, and often overwhelm what was originally a reasonable menu scheme. WWW sites with too shallow a link hierarchy depend on massive menu pages that over time devolve into confusing "laundry lists" of unrelated information, listed in no particular order:

Menu schemes can also be too deep, burying information beneath too many layers of menus:

Gopher sites are the classic example of the disadvantages of nested menus, where you sometimes have to open many folders before you hit any content documents. Menus lose their value if they don't carry at least four or five links; text or list-based menu pages can easily carry a dozen links without overwhelming the user or forcing users to scroll through long lists. Having to navigate through many layers of nested menus before you reach any real content is infuriating and unnecessary.

If your Web site is actively growing, the proper balance of menus and pages is a moving target. User feedback (and analyzing your own use of your Web site) can help you decide if your menu scheme has outlived its usefulness or has poorly designed areas. Complex document structures require deep menu hierarchies, but users should never be forced into page after page of menus if direct access is possible. The goal is to produce a well-balanced hierarchical tree that facilitates quick access to information and helps users understand how you have organized things.

References
December, J., and N. Randall. 1995. The World Wide Web unleashed. Indianapolis: Sams Publishing.
Horton, W. K. 1994. Designing and writing online documentation, 2nd edition. New York: Wiley.

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