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Hansel and Gretel where are you! – A lesson in breadcrumbs.

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Remember the story of Hansel Gretel, they were misled into Forest by the evil step mother and a father (who needed a smack around the head) due to not having enough food to eat.

The step mother thought it would be more convenient to leave the children in the forest to die and save on the grocery bills. Hansel (the son) aware of the plan, leaves a trail of pebbles so they can get back home.

When the children get home, the wicked step mother locks them and the next day and get their loving father to do the same thing again. This occurs a couple of time till the step-mother ( I bet she was ugly) is cranky and locks the two kids up for the night with a loaf of bread and water.

The next night, the dad ( who really is confused, probably more interested in his own needs than his children) triess the same plan again; this time Hansel leaves a trail of bread-crumbs, however they are eaten by the birds of the forest and the two children finally are lost in the woods. it’s hard to believe that people read these stories to their children, it’s so sad.

The main thing about the breadcrumb was the route to get them out of the forest back to home.

With the introduction of the Intranet and Internet web design came up with the concept of the breadcrumb, a way to get back to where you started or find out where you are in a structure.

If you’re not familiar with a breadcrumb they can sometimes look like this,

Acme Widgets Homepage -> Widgets Types -> Blue Widgets

This translated means:

Company Homepage->Subject->Topic

In reality could be:

Company Homepage.html ->Subject 1.html->Topic Page.html

Each part of the breadcrumb can be linked to a page thus allowing you to navigate back to the homepage.

One organisation I worked used this structure to navigate its organisation.

Acme Co Homepage -> Organisational Unit -> Sub-Organisation Unit -> Topic

Ultimately the Home page led back to the CEO and each link led to a responsible person in the organisation, neat eh!

I’ve also seen another organisation where they used organisation unit pages as the end point of the breadcrumb and there was no breadcrumb to the pages that connected the organisation link

Acme Co Homepage -> Organisational Unit -> Sub-Organisation Unit ??

This was one of many navigational challenges they had. As you can appreciate, this organisation had a low commitment of use to the Intranet.

So what’s the point of this conversation?

It’s so important to provide adequate navigational tools if you want to allows people to navigate a website and not leave it. Some sites provide adequate navigation which means they don’t need breadcrumbs. Their page name, their URL all lead to meaningful navigation.

Whatever navigation you use, make sure it’s clear, meaningful and concise. If you use Breadcrumbs, ensure that all the names in the breadcrumbs link to a page. That way you have traceability back across the site. For more reading go to useit.com

I hope you find this useful.

Chris

Navigation: Left hand menus, right hand menus, or both?

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Image of Johannes GutenburgJohannes Gutenberg… is one of my hero’s I discovered when I was studying church history in a theological course.

I had to do an assignment of my own making on the reformation. I found it hard finding one thing I could focus on. Would I research Martin Luther, (I love the bit where he discovered from the Bible that the just shall live by faith not by good works), or I could have done John Knox, that fiery Scottish Preacher or the effect of the reformation on Switzerland by John Calvin.

Other students choose their favourite subjects, but I had problems choosing what I wanted to do. My lecturer said “try and do something you can relate to”.

Prior to college I had spent by that time around 9 years in engineering, in particular manufacturing. Our company at the time was making production line equipment for car manufacturers. Gutenberg was the obvious choice, he invented a specialised piece of equipment, the mechanical printing press. Little did I realise then on how much impact that would have on study of usability some 15 years later.

Going back to 1439, up till that time most things were hand written.

At the time, this meant that there was an aristocracy on who was taught to read and write. People who usually read in those times were dignitaries, nobles and religious leaders. You can imagine that information could easily be manipulated for all the wrong reasons.

With the advent of Gutenberg’s mechanical printing press, formalisation of fonts and styles, and layout started to become standardised. One of the standardisations that occurred was the way you read a document, from left to right. Undoubtable that was how people were already  reading.

The upshot of this in the West is this; for over 500 years people have been reading documents from left to right.

It was logical then for the advent of the web to ensure that you read it from left to right. Others tried it however they soon found it didn’t work.

Having a left hand navigationmenu was a logical place for menu to go on the screen. It provided context for the user. In absence of a left hand menu you could have a right hand menu. That worked as long as it was the only menu.

So what happens when you have both? Do you mean to say that some places have two navigation menus, one on the left, the other on the right? Yes, it does happen. So what is the result? Your brain gets a little confused.

Try this exercise…..

Place your index finger on your nose then move you finger to the left. What happens, both eyes follow the finger. Move it to the right and your eyes will follow it to the right.

Move your finger away from you and in most cases your eyes will follow it and you will get a cross-eyed effect.

So what does this all mean?

Your eyes will either focus on the left, the right or centre wherever you your finger is. Some people can make each eye focus in different directions, these are special people, they are the minority.

So, if you have a left hand navigation and right hand navigation what do think is going to happen? The majority of people will gravitate to left hand side of the screen; if there is no left hand screen they will navigate to either to next dominant point either the right hand screen or near the header wherever the menu is placed.

Never a left hand or a right hand menu on the same screen as confusion will remain supreme.

The only exception to this is if you use the right hand menu for special activities, where a person many have to perform a work function that completes the activity on the page, closes off the work flow of the page. Examples of this are thing such as short messages, depending on the site advertisements, quick shortcuts and status.

Anyway, you may not agree, however I hope I’ve given you something to think about.

For further information check out Jakob Nielson’s comments on horizontal attention.

Chris

The Value of an Intranet

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“You don’t know how good something is until you loose it.”

If a company invests in an Intranet Site it is important that the value of the site be realised as an asset, early in its lifecycle.

Story… One organisation had built a substantial Intranet to cater for its 25,000 staff. It had become the thread to organisational navigation and knowledge. It had a team assigned to its management; it had standards, it was a good system. If you ever wanted to know anything about the organisation, you went to the Intranet.

The challenge I believe the company had was that it didn’t realise how valuable the Intranet site was to them.

They usually found this out the day there was a network issue and no one could access the Intranet. All of a sudden it was important to bring the system up ASAP.

If the company had taken the time to realise that this was a strategic information asset, I’m sure there would have been an increase in funding to enable newer technologies such as implementing a Content Management System rather than static HTML pages.

Some questions that may make you consider how valuable your Intranet is:

  • How many visitors utilise the Intranet on a daily basis? (Do you have any reporting in place to measure this)
  • How much corporate information is available on the Intranet?
  • If the Intranet was down, due to an outage, where would you go to get that same information in the interim?
  • How long would it take to get the static copies of the corporate information?
  • How long could you afford to have the Intranet inaccessible? 15 mins, less or more?
  • How much money would you potentially loose if the outage was more than say 15 mins? What about if it was half a day or a full day?

There’s a few questions to think about.

So, how valuable is your Intranet?

Intranet Corporate Design Standards

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There has always been a discussion on how corporate should an Intranet site be?

My first major experience of a corporate Intranet site was fascinating. It was the thread of a large national organisation of 25,000 employees.

Business units, executive units and teams had developed sites to promote their presence to the organisation. It was a useful tool in understanding the organisation. The organisation provided an alphabetical listing to find what you were looking for a long with proprietary search engine.

It’s front face to the Intranet had a common look and feel, as you got to the smaller business units it didn’t exist. My, weren’t the themes exciting! There were natural art themes, geographical themes, bad colored themes, nautical themes, etc.

The most exciting them was the Buccaneer theme. Behind the text lay pictures of swashbuckling adventures, of pirates and galleons, canons and swords, eh me arties, it was a site to behold, a thing of beauty, however totally out of context for managing Nan and Pop entitlements!

There was only one challenge; the backdrop was so fascinating that you forgot why you came to site. As you can imagine it wasn’t long till the ‘web Nazis’ (at the time we thought they were) said “enough is enough”.

A corporate standard was introduced and everyone hated it. The Web Nazi’s who adopt standards also promote the Borg delivery model of ‘resistance is futile’. (Star Trek idioms)

Well, after a couple of years of promoting the standard, information became more accessible to the reader. Information became more meaningful and the standard did allow for some variations within the theme.

The moral of the story is, corporate standards are not a bad thing. If you’re a small organization looking to grow, start standardising some of your templates; your internet site and intranet site. The value comes down the track as you absorb more information. It will be:

  • Easy to find
  • Easy for the search engine to find
  • More readable

Chris

High-level architecture imperatives of Web based systems

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The Sydney Harbour BridgeEarlier this year, I had the opportunity to catch up with a friend in Sydney who was on a short-term work assignment.

His accommodation was located adjacent to Sydney Harbour bridge.

If you live in Sydney (as I use to) you take the bridge for granted, in fact, if you’re a commuter, if can be a downright pain if you get stuck in the traffic.

While I waited for my friend to come out and meet me, I took the opportunity to take a couple of photos of my motorcycle with the bridge as backdrop.

I had travelled over this bridge for most of life, I had read books about its construction, I had climbed it with a friend, however, back in January this year, the ‘wow’ factor cut in.

Its purpose, what it does, how it was built, when it was built, who built it, and the location. When you start analysing it, its an amazingly architected wonder and a lot of thought went into to it.

If you look at the high-level architecture imperatives, we see the following. (Note! Put yourself in the picture back in 1920)

Imperative Response
What do we need? Access between the North side of Sydney Harbour (Port Jackson) to the South side to Sydney itself.
Why do we need it? Currently it takes some time to get to the other side of the harbour. You have to either go further west down the Parramatta river to cross, alternatively, catch a ferry or punt to get to the other side. This is time consuming and costly. Access is limited to a minority rather than the majority.
How will it be done? By creating a bridge that spans the Sydney harbour
When is it required? By 1933
Who will it be for? People who need to access either the north and south of the Sydney
Where will this be deployed? Adjacent to Sydney city to traverse the harbour.

Using this simple process, we can now apply this to any situation.

Let’s take a Web based system as an example.

What are the high-level imperatives or ‘scope’ for a Web based system used in an organisation?

Imperative Response
What do we need? An internal web based system that allows access organisation information, processes, procedures and other web based systems.
Why do we need it? Customer contact the company to find out information on product specifications. Staff are required access quickly product information. Currently the information exists in several system. Staff have to have several systems open on the desktop which is timely and cumbersome, especially when a telephone enquiry is underway. A system is require to allow quick and easy access to product information for customers and staff.
How will it be done? By implementing a web based system that aggregates the information in different system
When is it required? By the commencement of the next business year
Who will it be for? Customers and Staff
Where will this deployed? In the Internet environment for the Customers and in the organisation’s intranet environment for the Staff.

Now you can use this process to capture information down through several layers to get a better picture of your requirements. Some of those layers may be for instance:

  • Scope – This the big strategic view if the requirements (this is the table above)
  • Business Model – What are the business model that describe the scope
  • System View – What are the systems that will describe what’s needed
  • Technological Model – What Technologies will be used
  • Detailed Model – What are the detailed pieces of inventory that are required.

In the Enterprise computing scheme of things, this what we call the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework, created by John Zachman.

Information can be found at:

The great thing about using this approach is that it allows you to collect information on anything you need by asking the questions?

  • What is required?
  • Why is it required?
  • How will we do it?
  • When is it required?
  • Who is it for?
  • Where will this be deployed?

Chris

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