[thelist] Cooper on navigation

[Joshua Olson]

It's an interesting phenomena.  I tend to agree with him in some cases.
Take for example a current project I am working on.  I had to make a simple
tool that let the user create a news article.  There are quite a few things
involved in making the news article: enter author information, title,
summary, selection of page layout, content itself, selection of images,
restriction of content to user groups... etc.

Originally, I wrote an interface that put everything on one page, had very
simple input such as "Give to" followed by a dropdown including all defined
groups.  I found it very straightforward.  But during the course of
development, the PM (working with some inexperienced users as testers)
decided a 4 step process would be simpler.  Single words were expanded to
full sentences and questions (to fill real estate I imagine) and now the
process of creating an article seems very tedious.  The step through process
introduced problems with previewing the item and skipping steps, so I had to
introduce a method to keep track of where they were in the process as well
as flagging items as "incomplete" to prevent display on the front-end.

In a nutshell, a navigable system created *hours* of more work with revision
after revision of changes.  Additionally, the PM wanted the "step-through"
system on every admin in the system, leading to minute changes needing to be
propagated through every system.  Ugh.

IOW, I agree with the article in some cases.  Excessive navigation can lead
to some pretty serious confusion AND overhead.  Users that learn a tool can
be hindered by multiple steps even on a fast connection.  I can only imagine
what would happen on a slow connection.

-joshua

----- Original Message -----
From: "Madhu Menon" <webguru at vsnl.net>
Subject: [thelist] Cooper on navigation


: Alan Cooper of Cooper Interaction Design has a new article online.
:
: URL: http://makeashorterlink.com/?N2C91231