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Navigation and Usability

One of the most common arguments is whether site navigation should shape the physical structure of content or whether content structure will eventually reveal the best navigational method. This debate can escalate in stature to rival the philosophical discussion of the chicken or the egg.

Navigation and usability are all part of the user experience and will dictate how they view and interpret the site (usability guru Jakob Nielsen deals with this at great length on his Web site useit.com). And while I believe that both need to be taken into consideration, the integrity of content should never be compromised simply to accommodate a fancier navigational system.

So what are your options in terms of navigational structures? The limits are only in the imagination of the site designer, but the most common navigational types are:

• Hierarchical: A parent/child menu structure that allows users to begin navigating from broad, top-level topics to narrower, more specific topics.

• Sequential: Sibling-based navigational structure commonly used in step-by-step instructional pages that walk a user through a sequential series of steps.

• Site Maps: Site maps are at-a-glance blueprints of your entire site that allow users to quickly jump to a subsection without having to navigate the menu structure.

• Query-based: A more dynamic approach where content is delivered based upon a user's query. Users can quickly locate very specific content without the need to navigate through a series of menus. Search engines such as Google are a perfect example.

• Profile-based: A profile enable users to customized content based on their own predefined set of rules. Their user profile basically describes the type of content they wish to see and only have that displayed to them when they log onto the intranet.

Intranet owners can take advantage of one or a combination of these navigational types to best suit their particular site and content.

Site Flexibility

Intranet content should never be structured under the false assumption that it will always remain the same. Things have a tendency to change in the blink of an eye, and this is doubly true in the business world as well as in IT so it's vital to leave yourself a little bit of wiggle room.

Intranet owners need to arm themselves with the knowledge that an intranet is an evolving entity. What seems like fine-tuned content taxonomy today may be a confining stranglehold a year down the road.

As an intranet grows, increased traffic may surpass network threshold and may warrant a split from one single, dedicated server to multiple servers. And changes in business requirements, priority shifts, or corporate restructuring may drastically change the make-up of an intranet. It's vital that the organization of intranet content be flexible enough to adapt to these changes with minimal effort.

Two of the most common ways to categorize content on an intranet are:

1. by function (for example; input forms, FAQs, applications, and reports)
2. by context (mirroring corporate, departmental, or project structure)

Here is a very simple view of the two categorization methods:

Simple example of content organization by function and by context.

There are advantages to grouping content of similar function into one location (such as manual updating of similar pages), but they don't measure up to the flexibility offered through contextual organization.

Referring to the example above, if you ever needed to extract and move the IT branch, function-based classification will require you to rebuild a whole new structure at the new location whereas context-based classification allows you to move the self-contained IT branch with relative ease, and little restructuring is required.

Conclusion

Content organization is meant to set a relationship between data — it's meant to group and categorize content. But there's no single, black box solution for every intranet case. It will be up to intranet owners to decide the most effective way to organize content, allowing for maximum user experience while still maintaining a level of flexibility and ease of maintenance.