[IxDA Discuss] FW: swapping navs?

[Dante Murphy]

Leah-
While I was with GSI Commerce, we were faced with a similar problem when
trying to tackle the sprawling taxonomy of the Sports Authority
e-commerce website.  We came up with a "scoped navigation" approach that
kept peer choices visible on each level, but collapsed choices one level
up (assuming that the second click in category affirmed the relevance of
the first).

Here's a link:
http://www.sportsauthority.com/category/index.jsp?categoryId=712913&cp=2
057782

It works fairly well in this category because some of the peer choices
are always on screen.  It does not work so elegantly in the "Team
Sports" category because there are so darn many choices.  This is also
the reason why the selected item always goes to the top, instead of
staying in its alphabetically-sorted position (a necessary but somewhat
ugly compromise).  Part of the design also included a recommendation to
severely shrink the taxonomy, and as you can see that recommendation was
not followed.

However, the project was moderately successful.  Visits into secondary
categories like the example "Kneeboarding" went up, cross-navigation was
supported, and none of the most popular categories suffered any decrease
in sales or traffic.  Sadly, GSI rarely did any user testing for this
client, so I can't speak to tangible results there.  But anecdotally,
it's been like this for almost two years, so it can't be that bad.

Hope that helps,
Dante

_______________________________________
Dante Murphy | Director of Information Architecture
Medical Broadcasting Company  |  A  D I G I T A S INC. COMPANY


Subject: [IxDA Discuss] swapping navs?

I'm working on a site where I've maxed out the left nav by the time I
get to the product level. Each product then has its own navigation
within it. The way I see it is that my options are pretty much swapping
out the left nav for the lower level nav, having a right hand nav for
the product, or finding some sort of innovative way to do it in the
whitespace.(the navs are too long to do as whitespace tabs).  My
question is if anyone knows of any research done on whether users find
swapping out the left nav for lower level navs confusing. Also, any
other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks

Leah Cunningham