Navigational Cues

[toolman]

Following in the steps of Nielsen's recommendation for navigational clues as to where the visitor is at any given time in the site I embarked on an endeavor to produce this. I have come up with a very viable, although very labor intensive system as each page needs to be set up to diplay it's position in the navigation bars. I am pondering abandoning this situation as I am looking at the main domain plus 10 subdomains under and it would be much more efficient to inject menus by ssi.

Question: Does it really enhance the user experience significantly on a large site to know precisely what page they are on by visual cues in the navigation menu's?

[mivox]

On my sites, I just use a topical headline on each page. That way they know where they are. Then I make sure I have navigation links or buttons to each major section of the site (perhaps the index page of each subdomain for you?). That way they know where they can go from where they are.

I've never had any complaints on my navigation systems, but when visiting other websites, I often appreciate the little "breadcrumb" Home > Section > Subsection > Page style navigation links... I think (tho I'm not sure) that I've seen scripts that will automatically create breadcrumb links for you, with SSI of course. It's a good idea for really huge sites, but not necessary, IMO.

[Xoc]

I think it really is important to tell where on a site you are.

I created a system using ASP and XML that works. Took about 3 weeks to write, but is now trivial to add new pages and manage the site. Check my URL in the profile for a demo.

[tedster]

My experience with breadcrumb trails is that only the tech-savvy really undertand them, and on many sites, this is not the demographic. Breadcrumbs trials are a boggle for the casual user, or for anyone whose mind does not organize information in a linear, hierarchical fashion. I've discovered this in several small scale usability tests.

Much more important, I find, are page headings that correspond exactly with the link names that people click on to arrive at the page. It's surprising how many sites don't pay attention to this, and it creates confusion for techie and newbie alike.

Another problem I sometimes have creating breadcrumb trails on some sites -- the actual directory structure does not correspond to the graphically presented site structure that the user sees.

For instance, a vistor may have the sense that they have drilled down to:

level_1 > level_2 > level_3 > level_4 > level_5

But if the folder structure were really that deep (using full keywords for directory names) then the URL would be too many characters long for some spiders. So the actual URL I use for "level_5" might just be domain.com/level_5