Hot answers tagged navigation
27
It can work well, but I wouldn't recommend the method that you are proposing.
You can use breadcrumbs as a form of progress bar, which not only solves your navigation issue, but shows what still has to happen better than a pure progress bar. It is also common practice on some of the most used websites, so your users are likely to already be used to it.
...
10
While you could probably get away with it, it is a bad idea.
If you're going to use a well know pattern like this, it raises an expectation about its behavior. This is why patterns are so powerful and useful: users will recognize them and immediately be able to build a mental model of the way your website works.
If you break this pattern, you break all ...
9
Two level menus are better for usability than traditional drop-down menus, because the user doesn't have to navigate carefully in multiple directions.
As AskTog explains, with traditional, multi-level drop-down menus:
The bottleneck is the passage between the first-level menu and the second-level menu. Users first slide the mouse pointer down to the ...
9
Users are used to pagination and don't mind flicking through pages. Almost like a shop catalogue. Users in real life do it (i.e. Argos), users do it in virtual life (i.e. Amazon).
Some of the advantages of using pagination are:
Pagination gives the user a sense of how far along they are
Pagination makes it easy to remember where they saw something they ...
7
Other than the obvious answer: "re-write your app so it supports common user actions better" You could try manipulating the browser history using new development techniques (usually outside the scope of a UX answer). Otherwise, a JavaScript alert will only fire after the users have tried to leave the page for any reason, which might be confusing to them. ...
7
This answer is more or less a paraphrase of what I remember about what Jef Raskins says in The Humane Interface about KLM:
Say K is the time it take to hit a keystroke, P the time to put the cursor in some place of the screen, H the time to go from the keyboard to the mouse and vice versa, M the time for the user so she can prepare to the next action, R the ...
6
If you're talking about mobile apps, the top left is the standard position for both iOS and Android (technically it's the up button on Android, but that's close enough).
If you're talking about a website, there is no standard placement for a back button, as there is a keyboard back button, and so most sites don't bother with a back button.
That said, I ...
6
Menus are a navigation element and so what make the most sense is whatever makes navigation easier for your users.
Your first example is a good menu, as although you have only one item under 'Otters', it wouldn't make sense renaming 'Otters' to 'Sarah' as it would then look like 'Sarah' were a type of animal. Additionally, if you get a second otter to keep ...
6
Horizontal menu's don't readily support more than one level. Nesting or indentation are difficult to achieve, leading to many hard to use solutions widely documented in many articles and here on UX.SE. I'm no big fan of the Windows 8 website for instance, at the third level deep it just becomes weird.
Web documents are usually laid out for scrolling ...
5
It's a question of costs and risks. Which is worse: users getting an incentive without really trying, or false data being taken during research and becoming misread as "official user feedback"? I'd suggest the latter. Forcing categorisation means participants create weak categories just for the sake of including miscellaneous items. That means weak silos ...
5
It is absolutely okay to chose that pattern. The only thing you should worry about is making the link different enough from the others that user will know that something else will happen once he/she clicks on it.
The easiest and least subtle way to do this would be to style the tab completely different from other tabs — for example like a link:
Or you ...
4
The general rule is that if you can achieve the same result with less user interaction, you should do it.
Infinite scroll is one of the clearest ways of handling this. When someone has scrolled to the bottom (or near the bottom) of the screen, it's a fair bet that their next action would be to load more or go to the next page. So is you load more ...
4
There are lots of visual cues you can add to make it more understandable:
An arrow or +/- sign to indicate expanded state (it's expanded/collapsed state is apparent but an arrow can reinforce that).
Lines to indicate the hierarchical tree relationship, these can be very subtle, just slightly visible
Nested boxes to indicate hierarchical relationship, again ...
4
The amount of clicks required is something you can measure about an interface. It's a number and if managers like one thing it's numbers. It is however impossible to learn anything about the quality of an interface from a usability/ux point of view by counting clicks.
I have seen it happen: people trying to improve an interface by reducing clicks through ...
4
If it's just a screen with text on it, then there are two options that work on both a large and a small screen equally well:
Navigate by swiping. Swipe left or right should related to back and forward respectively. This is a common pattern that has proven to work.
Place thin transparent navigation bars on the left and right with a clickable area much ...
3
If you are using the progress bar to move forward and backward, you are essentially implying that the user is 'undoing' his progress or is able to jump forward (?) in progress.
Separate your concerns and use the progress bar to show progress and use a navigation to navigate. Do not jumble the things. If the user needs to think twice whether his action will ...
3
I've just done a little quick and dirty analysis on the OptimalSort database for you.
Eyeballing some of the instructions messages suggests that most studies are not prompting the use of a "don't know" group. So I've counted the number of participants who did anyway using the following criteria:
... where label REGEXP '(don\'t|dont|misc|confus|not ...
3
Considering you are really asking about hover menus.
They can be a really good mean in creating a rich content website. It is also a trap in which you do not want to fall.
They are hard to use because they are often badly designed. @Marvin is pointing at some issues you can deal with while using them in your graphic interface.
Amazon has been kind enough ...
3
In left-to-right languages people are used to reading from the left, and so objects on the left hand side get more attention than those on the right (all things being equal of course). Menus and navigation have traditionally been on the left, but many sites choose to put them on the right so that the content can have focus (on the left).
So even on PC's ...
3
I would recommend two actions:
Keep the thumbnails screen clean, minimizing the chrome and buttons. A tap on a thumbnail opens a new screen that contains the photo and an action bar with all the desktop context menu options. You can hide this action bar in a few seconds (or with a user tap) to keep the photo alone. This way you have a safe and visible ...
2
There are a few guidelines (number of items, etc.) you can use to decide between the two options. But, beyond those it is upto you as a designer, what choice you want to make. I have highlighted some cases where a particular design might be more favorable to use.
A tab based navigation is only useful if you have a small number of tabs (4-6). Many apps ...
2
Regarding the Next button on top or bottom: Do both!
Sounds like a great idea to split it into multiple steps, especially if you need to validate some parts before continuing to others. In that case, you will have to disable the Next button in the stepper, or in your custom navigation bar.
Starting from iOS, the Back button should be found in the top left ...
2
Typically in this situation applications will present a dialog that looks something like this:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
This is in line with your intuition that a warning that "going back" is unsupported behavior is the best UX to provide in this situation.
Note that it may be possible to support the back ...
2
Menus don't have to be logic they have to be meaning and useful.
If there is one "child" then you do not need a "parent" like a unique radio button does not make sense.
Having sub-navigation on-click is common but very replaceable
Most web sites do not have sub-navigation menus. A book of one chapter does not need a summary: you just read it, a house with ...
2
If you are using sliding animations between screens, you should stick to the convention that pushing a new view from the right = forward, and from the left = backwards. Otherwise your sliding animation not only looses its purpose, but it actually then causes confusion by implying something that isn't true.
The second part of your question is more ...
2
Horizontal menus and vertical menus are needed to aid information architecture - otherwise there is a danger to end up with the menu like the one on old Amazon website (could not find image unfortunately).
Typically, horizontal menu would be used at higher level, perhaps even horizontal subnav, but you definitely would not want to have a third layer of ...
1
Would it be a bad idea to allow them to define groups instead of using the Don't know group? This way, you get them to help with the categorization of cards and then you can use newly created groups to help other users who don't know what how to group their cards.
'Don't know' is fine but I would imagine that someone will have to step in behind someone ...
1
Make it intuitive and proceed observantly.
In 2009 a Nielsen Norman Group finding Big, 2-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain users' choices.
This sounds great... but (and this is all very old by internet standards).
In 2010 they revised their statement after ...
1
If your site is also to be viewed on mobile devices, you should use "Load More", in order to allow the user whether he/she would like to spend more of his data plan's bandwith.
Also, this depends on the type of data you will present.
For casual data, and on desktop/laptop devices, auto-scroll is ok.
For business data, always use "Load more", so the user ...
1
Maybe there is something with that important number of thumbnail images since it is the same product :
Do the images show the product in different colours ?
Then show only the colours.
Do the images show the product from different angles ?
Then using arrows might be a better option (or fake 3D).
Do the images show the details of the product ?
Then ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
