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Usability Tip:
Test Your Navigation System
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Want to improve your site's navigation system? Here's an easy way: try asking your friends to do some card tricks.
Usability testing has become a hot topic for Web designers. Usability experts like Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool have become Internet stars preaching the site testing gospel. Their message boils down to a simple truth: if you want to improve your Web site, you need to watch how real people interact with it first. User testing with live subjects can uncover some real problems with your site.
One of the easiest forms of usability testing is the card sort test. This is an early-stage test of your site's navigation system. Here's how it works.
First, plan the organization of your Web site. Think of all the areas you want to put on the site, but don't group them into any sort of navigation system yet.
Next, take a stack of index cards and use them to represent your site, with each card being a page or area within the site. Give each card a title and a short description of its subject.
Now show these cards to a friend (ideally someone who's not already involved with your site) and ask them to sort the cards into logical categories. Let them take as long as they like and use as many or as few categories as they want.
Ask your friend to label each of their categories, and then ask them how they came up with the categories they chose.
Repeat this process with other people. After testing with 3-5 people, you should start to see patterns emerge in the way information is sorted. These patterns should be the basis for your navigation system.
This approach acts as a double check on your site's structure. It can keep you from organizing your pages into sections that may not make sense to many people.
For example, suppose you're designing a site for a car dealership. You're considering these categories for the site, but you want to reduce the total number of groups on your navigation system:
2-Door Sedans
4-Door Sedans
Pickup Trucks
Sport Utility Vehicles
Sports Cars
Mini-Vans
Cargo Vans
Station Wagons
Luxury Cars
Compact Cars
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Grouping these different types of cars raises some questions. Should Sport Utility Vehicles be grouped with Pickup Trucks into a category called "Trucks?" Or should they be grouped with Mini-Vans and Station Wagons into a category called "Family Cars." Should cars be grouped by their size? Or maybe by price?
Keep in mind that the purpose of this exercise is to gain insight into how people view your site, not to hold a group vote on your navigation system. If a significant minority of testers has an alternative way of grouping your categories, you should consider that in your design. In this example it's likely that you'll see several equally logical groupings emerge. That's a good sign that you may want to cross-link sections of the site or list car types under multiple categories.
This test is easy to do, and it's a lot of fun too. Try it on your site and see what kind of results you get.
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