Web Guidelines - Site Architecture and Navigation

Before You Begin Building a Web Site

1. Identify the audiences for your site. Who visits your site regularly? What demographic information do you know about them? What terms would they use to identify themselves?
2. Identify users' major tasks. What do your users want to accomplish on your site? What information are they looking for? You can determine this by conducting user interviews, administering surveys and examining existing search query records if you have them.
3. Organize information by audience, task, or both. Depending on the type and breadth of information you need to present, select one or two organizational systems for your page and clearly delineate them. Ideally, after one quick look, users will be able to understand how the information is organized. This does not mean that they will have memorized all of the information contained on the page. It just means that they will know how and where to look for what they want to find.
4. Further organize lists of material (lists of links, offices, etc.) alphabetically. Other organization systems imply potentially unintended preferences and can confuse users.

Naming

1. Use consistent terminology. Be aware that one term can represent different kinds of information. For example, a link to "Academics" can reasonably be a link to the academics section of Web Central (http://www.utexas.edu/academic/) or a link to a page that contains audience specific academic resources (http://www.utexas.edu/student/academics.html). Do not use the same term to refer to different pages. For example, if you have a section of your site devoted to policy, select a consistent word and use it on all pages that refer to the policy section of the page. Avoid calling it "Policy & Procedures" on the index page, but calling it "Policy Information" on subsequent pages.
2. Ask yourself what kind of information the user expects to find behind a given link. Link labels should match the title of the page that the link leads to. For example, when a user clicks on the "campus events" link, they should be directed to a page entitled "Campus Events."
3. Spell out all acronyms at their first use. Example: The Web Office is part of Information Technology Services (ITS). Do not assume that users know what an acronym stands for.
4. Label items logically and include helpful scope notes throughout. For example, the Office of Institutional Studies provides student statistics, such as demographics for entering freshman classes. During usability testing of the redesign for www.utexas.edu, we asked users to find this demographic data. Only one user (a staff member) was able to find it because she already knew what information Institutional Studies provided.
   
   If a term or a name of an office isn't intuitive or explanatory, provide details. A scope note is a brief description which adds depth to the navigational elements. Consider removing repeat instances of "Office of" in front of names
5. Avoid using icons or graphics as the only source of labeling information. Graphics and icons can be misinterpreted.

Navigating

1. Use a similar navigation and aesthetic scheme as the main page (http://www.utexas.edu). During usability testing, users found the shifts between Web Central and other independent university sites jarring and confusing because they were so visually and architecturally different. In organizing your pages, try to emulate the navigation scheme and aesthetic elements of the high-level utexas.edu pages as much as possible.
2. Include some visual clue that a page a user is about to visit requires an EID. Several times during previous usability testing of pages within utexas.edu, users selected pages which required them to use a university EID. They usually selected these pages by accident while searching for other information, but were totally baffled when confronted, without warning, with the EID page. If a linked page requires an EID login, there should be a visual clue that designates this before the user clicks on the link.
3. Do not link pages back to themselves.
4. Make thumbnail pictures clickable links. Users expect thumbnails to be links to the material they represent.
5. Include the organization's name on all pages. This might be done as part of the title or header of the page.
6. Let users know where they are at any given time in the information hierarchy of your site. The navigational system should present the structure of the information hierarchy in a clear and consistent manner and indicate the location within that hierarchy.