[thelist] three usability questions

[Stuart Young]

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My second question is perhaps the most likely to be my subjective 
opinion: The site serves different audiences - for instance, there's 
stuff for kids, stuff for parents, stuff for legislators, stuff for 
attorneys. The information for each audience isn't useful to anyone 
outside of that target audience. So that's how the site is organized, a

top-level section for each audience. The consultant wishes to change 
the top level sections to conceptual categories, like "articles", 
"advocacy", "resources", etc. Am I off in thinking that the site will 
be less usable to visitors if the content intended only for them is 
spread out across the site among content not intended for them instead

of in a single section with everything for that audience? Six one, half

a dozen the other?
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I would say do both! 

Organise the site via topic or category if that is what the client
wants, but also have pages for each audience that draw together relevant
resources for each audience - I would make the middle-top of the
homepage have the links to "For parents" "For lawyers" "For students"
and have the category/topic navigation as a horizontal nav bar or
left-hand column nav menu.

Similarly each category/topic could also have "For parents" "For
lawyers" "For students" links to filter all the content in that
section.

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Last query: If we end up doing conceptually grouped sections, the site

hierarchy will be pushed one level deeper to 5 levels of links for just

a few articles. She has suggested making the second level links 
"hierarchical menus" . I think it's a bad idea! a. They're so "1999"  
b. It seems horrid usability to make site navigation go like this:
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Agree that having DHTML drop-down menu as the only way of navigating is
a dumb idea - I would only use them as a way for experienced return
users who already understand the hierarchial organisation of the site to
be able to quickly get from one node to another. I would have them
available as an option on every page. The main navigation though would
be via on the page links (they're so 1995!) 

cheers


Dr Stuart Young,       +64 (0)9-815 4321 Ex 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz>     
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
http://hyperdisc.unitec.ac.nz/staff/syoung.htm
I would provide a URL for my official staffpage, but its too long and
complex