Navigate or Search?

Menus or Inputs? Keyboard or Mouse? Whether to use a horizontal or vertical navigation or just the easiest question that pops, why not just search?

While designing interfaces for websites, there’s a pay-per-view kind of fight of Search vs. Navigation whether to use a bigger Search box or keep more space for the Navigation. Every website is different. How do we decide that?

Simple websites would have the generic about, services/products, contact us, kind of navigation with straight forward content structure, usually the corporate websites that could be categorized under Business Card Websites or Company Profile online. Bigger ones would have more pages to show, more information to show thus more navigational links whether horizontal or vertical or even including search.

Interactive websites and the ones with dynamic updates and an active team behind the content of the Website usually tend to get its navigation working all around; inline with content, horizontal, vertical, search, tag clouds, end-links, and some even interactively hand over links based on user behavior.

Now the question again, Search vs. Navigation, which, when, and how dominant each should be?

There are three factors that decide that:

1. Type of Users(searching users, navigating users)
2. Type of Content
3. Website Size in terms of content & pages

Type of Users

How are the users using the website? The reasons we’re using the present tense is the fact that mostly this gets asked after the design finalization and website launches, and of course for not being able to find out the user segments. So how do we find out the user/visitor segments?

Logging the visitors and segmenting them by those who land in the homepage and start using the Search and those who land and start using the Navigation. This could be a dynamic blend of people who are used to search vs. those who are used to clicking links. Based on this we could decide how big a search box be, or how to utilize the Navigation space and its visibility, it’s all relative to the results.

There’s an exception to this case, and that’s the rereness of the content of a website which forces users to use the website based on the websites design, this is where we toss the Behavior Injection term where the users get adopted to a series of interactivity habits forced by the rare and yet needed websites. A perfect example in the Arabia would be the forums, users have become accustomed to the use and the navigational structures of the Forums that they would want every other website to be made like a Forum, Categories and endless Threats all in a vertical form where the Global Navigation gets unnoticed most of the times.

Type of Content & Size

Content is King, Navigation is the Messenger. User is the Conqueror?

Based on the type of the content, whether an e-commerce website, or a socially interactive or just static informational content, it has to be navigated, after all it’s the Markup model. This can be again related to Users, but not the user type, but the user’s anticipation and use of the website. A corporate profile website would have simple linear information that is often easy to grasp and understand, copy/information, easy, it doesn’t make one think. For those websites, a set of links(navigation) whether inline, horizontal/vertical, search wouldn’t be as important, obvious.

For those complex content models with dynamically changing items/articles the decision is often hard to make. Content is there to please the user/reader. So how do we make’em happy? We could say well, again, based on the user segmentation we could decide how to make’em navigate or find information?

The problem, content is often driven by a business model that makes either a product/service/ad spaces sold, so some part of the work is done on Semi Injecting the content navigation and structure. Some would sell keywords on Search queries, some would sell a category sponsorship, so both models of navigation could come in handy in generating revenue. For that reason, depending on how important is the Business Model’s effect on the content and website’s/business performance the Navigation/Search could be combined relative to that.

Size of the content and its variety is another important element in this game, how many levels of categorization/sections/tagging could be done? Given that mostly old websites with unspecialized content go through such a stiff problem(simple solution, make smaller websites under one bigger umbrella) which is usually hard to do when the theme of a website is a niche that if broken down loses its wealth. So that’s where search becomes a secondary tool for the needle to be found in the hay stack.

An argument in such cases is, well, how about the Homepage as a visual Sitemap or simply a linear sitemap that would map the content. In our processes and analysis we call homepage as the “Grand” navigation, we could tell that when a homepage is structured in a planned manner with a good understanding of the business model and the users segments, it’s usually a Navigation initiator, where the homepage makes the user familiar with how items get organized in a website and how they are categorized. Our analysis have proved one major point, website that have bad navigation or minimal search functionality create a “Click Back” button actions to reach the homepage to start over the navigation process.

To sum this up, it’s an interestingly debatable topic whether to enlarge the Search box or make room for more Navigation Tabs or avoiding some of each. It’s all user & content related, steered by the business model and the point of Sales of a website.

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