Oh dear. I normally tend to stay relatively mum about my work life here, but Mark Hurst's 3/8 issue of Good Experience, Debating the Page Paradigm, is compelling me to respond publicly. (If you aren't familiar with Mark's Page Paradigm, you should check the 2/19 issue and peterme's response to get current first.)

Among other comments and responses to the comments in Mark's recent email was this criticism by peterme:

For those of you managing sites of more than 50 pages, heed Mark's suggestions at your own risk. It's been a while since I've worked on a site that had less than 1000 pages, and such sites require clear, coherent, and consistent navigation systems. Largely because this notion of "the Goal" doesn't apply -- many users have many different goals, and those goals will shift over time.

To which Mark responded:

(I invite Peter to count the pages of our clients' websites... AARP.com, AMD.com, WashingtonPost.com, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Travelocity, and the others listed on the Creative Good clients page..)

First, to be technically correct, it's AARP.org. While you might not think so given the recent Medicare press, AARP is actually a non-profit. We do serve AARP.com entries (actually, we redirect 'em to AARP.org), but externally we are AARP.org.

But that's a minor quibble. I realize that Mark's point is that Creative Good does work with clients that have large websites. And in fact, they did some listening labs for us just last Thursday. I think Creative Good is great (we must, we've done several projects with them and hope to do more).

But...

I respectfully suggest that the original Page Paradigm email contained some language that could either be mis-interpreted and/or construed as contradictory. A colleague and I in AARP's web group found that we needed to correct a well-meaning content provider who happily emailed her staff that Mark Hurst said that users don't care where they are in the website, and so we should stop worrying about where content should live. It's not hard to see how she came up with this, as Mark had written:

USERS DON'T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE.

I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about "where content should live."

For the record, at the listening labs I mentioned, most of our 8 participants followed Mark's page paradigm, where they either 1) clicked something that appeared to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or 2) clicked the Back button on their Web browser.

But my point is that visitors may not care where they are in the website, but where content "lives" (essentially is linked to) has a considerable amount to do with whether they are able to click on something that will take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal. Similarly, once they are on a page relative to their goal, they are amenable to related navigation and promotional links. Shades of Jared Spool's seducible moment, which seems to be supported by the success of Google's program.

In the 3/8 issue responding to criticism from IAs, Mark wrote:

I said that for years I have observed users paying all their attention to completing their goal and no attention (outside of that) to navigation elements, which information architects fret over endlessly ...

But how do you separate the importance of navigation elements that help users complete their goal and the emphasis on navigation outside of that? And isn't it worth it to provide another alternative if someone's landed on a deep page besides going back to the home page?

I agree with the two-step Page Paradigm. Web visitors will either click something that looks like it takes them to their goal or go back (and in our case, it is with the Back button). But there's been language in the last two newsletters that has caused me just a bit of angst. I'm not sure if that's because Mark's doing a bit of Jakob-like rhetoric or just because this kind of communication is inherently difficult--or because even though we've come a long way baby, we're still dealing with some conceptually challenging issues.

If we have a foe in developing good user experiences, I don't think it's the endlessly fretting IAs--the West Coast ones or the polar bear ones :). For the record, AARP (or at least the people who I work with in the web group) IS committed to the use of a good IA and useful navigation to getting visitors closer to their (frankly very scary number of) goals.

07:18 PM | linkme | home