Hello -
What a very helpful and interesting website! Please note that this
answer is not finished until you're satisfied with it. If you choose
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clarification or information you may require.
The very first topic that comes to mind when I visit your site is "how
accessible it is." We want to make sure four principles are being
applied for every page:
1) There's not too much to look at.
2) There's no competition to the eye as to what to look at.
3) There is *no* effort involved to get from point A to point B (as
soon as there's effort, you've lost attention span).
4) The user can get access to the most important things from anywhere.
Since one of the very first questions in a user's mind is, "where do I
click first," I would make sure the primary links on the home page are
front and center. Right now they look "back burner" in terms of their
position on the page. In general, you don't want to have to scroll
down to see the central links on a site's first page. Links
positioned toward bottom should be reserved for secondary information
such as "Privacy Policy," "Terms of Use," "Contact Us," etc.
To avoid any confusion as to "what to look at first" when visiting the
page, I might take the "Google ~Guide" banner graphic and make it
flush to the top. I'd take the testimonial quote, decrease its font
size, and put it in a narrow column off to the left, along with
perhaps another quote underneath it. I would put "By Nancy Blachman"
underneath "An interactive tutorial on searching with Google."
In the very center of the page I would do one of two things: arrange
your current links one underneath the other, or put your Introduction
text right there. For the latter, this is advantageous to the user
because there's no confusion or hesitation as to what to look at
first. From what I can read of the introductory text, it's probably
not something you want people to skip.
After reading this text, we want to jump directly into the contents of
the guide. Although you have provided a first-level table of contents
at the top of each page, I would suggest a different table to be
arranged in a separate column off to the left (like an Adobe Acrobat
type of arrangement) that's always available to the user when reading
any section of the guide. A person is normally geared to viewing
tables of contents, indexes, etc. as vertically arranged lists. The
current links across the top don't convey whether they themselves link
to the content, or if you have to click on "Contents" to get to it.
In addition, when clicking on those links, the red sub-links that
appear don't appear to me as clickable links to additional
sub-content. A column off to the left will enable you to have every
element of the table of contents clearly visible and accessible at all
times. It will also eliminate any confusion with the actual content
of the guide itself, since there's no more competition visually
between the two being on top of each other.
Another important element with regard to navigation is having an
ever-present "Search the guide" input field in a top (right) corner --
or perhaps right above the new table of contents, where someone can
easily search the guide without having to scroll down to look for a
place to search or think twice about it.
Hope these suggestions help! Please don't hesitate to ask any questions.
Thanks,
jbf777 |
