I've a tree structure which extends to 6 levels down. When I get inside as a user I like to show the tree structure in my left panel and content on the right.
But I'm worried since too much of data in the right panel makes the user soo busy.
how can I optimise this? And also I should have an option to navigate inside the table of contents.
I think that this level of complexity can be supported in various ways, e.g.:
Shortcuts – you can suggest most popular places somewhere in the interface.
Search – let your users find what they look for, support the tree with a quick, on the fly search field using mechanisms as fuzzy search (e.g. searching for 'folder construction' should also find 'construction of folders', error correction (e.g. searching for 'floder' should find 'folder') and synonyms (e.g. searching for 'directory' should find 'folder' as well).
Interlinking – in big structures like this one, exact categorisation may be problematic. Users may be looking for 'red shoes' in either 'red' or 'shoes' branch for example. Hence telling them that there is another place where the content they might be looking for would live, may be important.
Use analytics & user feedback to analyse where they make mistakes and provide improvements within the tree structure (still: be careful about it and provide a navigation from old branch to new branch to let users know how its placement has changed).
