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Design architecture

Published by Esteban Glas on November 30th, 2006 | This post lacks all category except for: Design, Marketing, Web, Web Marketing

Inspired by Krista’s post on Mercedes Benz’s USA website I started thinking about what makes a site better than the next. I mentally tried to make an extensive list of items, but failed miserably. The truth is I really don’t think that there are all that many things you should think about when designing your site’s architecture. What strikes first is that so many people simply ignore such a short list. What hit me after that is how many people ignore this short list. And then it stroke me again.

Following is a description of the list’s items and descriptions.

Get me there. Pronto.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. In your web you should have as many straight lines as you can. People want to get to their point of interest quickly. To achieve this not only you need to have a lot of links handy at every page but you need to order them in a clear and understandable way, and shouldn’t cause any clutter. In the good old days of web 1.0 3 or 4 clicks were acceptable; nowadays I fear that 2 is the limit for most cases. (there are exceptions, of course, some processes, like shopping carts or finding drivers can take longer in terms of clicks and people are used to that).

Keep it understandable.
Although it might get a little bit into the graphic design part of it (it’s inherent to a good architecture) which I intend to cover on a later post it is an important point to underline. Keep design simple understandable and expectable up to a certain extent. An example: Say you have roll-out menus. We’ve all seen them in the past as drop downs or coming from the left side bars (rolling from left to right). Now we also have some coming form bottom up (haven’t seen any in web, but the windows start button rolls in that direction, although I find it annoying). So, in your design you go ahead and put up roll outs that work from right to left… it simply wont work (well, it probably will in Israel, for example, since they write in that direction), people are not used to do things that seem “unnatural”, out of place or too unexpected.

You must know where you stand.
Keep visible and URL clues (if possible) of where people are standing inside the hierarchy of the site. It is imperative to know with just a glance how “deep” or “specific” the page you are looking at is. Thus you can easily go to any other “level” you want.

Search is your best friend.
A comprehensive internal search engine is imperative. As sites keep growing in sections and content a search engine is usually a very powerful tool to easily get to the intended places. Ideally you should also be able to “customize” some search terms. Think of it as some sort of internal ad words. Of course you need to be extra careful when setting it up and using it, since you sure don’t want to abuse this and ruin the real use of an internal search.

Stay Consistent.
Logical consistency in design architecture is a must. Few things are more annoying than the feeling that everything is out of place after a few pages. This should apply to all areas, from URLs to graphic design.

Only 5 highlights. That’s the list I think you must keep in mind when designing the architecture for a website. 5 things many (many!!) sites refuse to acknowledge.

Esteban Glas

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