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Oct
27
SharePoint Question of the Day: Best Practices for Navigation
This one showed up in my email box this afternoon. I thought it could provoke a nice discussion on the best practices for developing navigation in SharePoint.
“Hi Guys! Wondered if you could advise on best practice for navigation display in SharePoint. Our inhouse SharePoint team has insisted that all Intranet sites built in Sharepoint give up 1/3 of the landscape to a lefthand menu with fly-outs.
“This is fine for a shallow collaboration site, but it doesn’t seem practical for a deep publishing site. We feel that modern best practice is toward multiple navigation methods, for ex., a top navigation supplemented by the left-hand to navigate locally or though process steps. Can you weigh in on this?”
What do you think? Could get pretty interesting if they are insisting on 1/3 left-hand navigation on a 21 inch monitor. Seems to me, there’s a potential discussion here.
Consistent multiple navigation — with the emphasis on consistent throughout the site hierarchy.
In approaching my design — disclosure: I am in my infancy when it comes to designing sites; my primary job is IT Admin — I look to my experience as an end user. I judge on how easy it is for me as an end user to find what I need quickly and efficiently. MS TechNet and Cisco always come to mind, and this applies over the 10 years I have been using those sites. Multiple navigation — left side, links within content, top navigation, bread crumbs, top-notch search — is key.
1/3 of the screen and fly out navigation doesn’t sound great, its probably eats a bit too much screen up but the benefits from a consistent navigation over a site outweighs that, IMHO.
But that said, some of the most popular sites like the BBC, use context specific navigation.
As Joan said above though, a top quality search is probably more important now than navigation.
1/3 of a screen is a bit of a random metric… What if it’s a netbook with 600 vertical pixels? Even Mark’s 21″ monitor might be running at 1024 x 768 if his eyesights not all that (too many late nights posting to EUSP!) or it may be glorious full HD at 1080 vertical pixels.
Sites that I build tend to feature a consistent Global Navigation across the entire Site Collection with local navigation on the left hand site. I always train site admins to know and love the Navigation management tools in WSS and MOSS as they are going to be spending a fair bit of time there.
I don’t like the default headings automatically created whenever you create a List or Library and encourage site owners to manage the number of headings and items to < 7 if possible.
From my experience if you repeat navigation 'Labels' across sites then they soon become familiar… you may have a Navigation Header that is called 'Interact' or 'Your Say' and have links to a feedback form, surveys and discussion forum there. If this is the same on each site users know where to look.
I agree with MB – consistency = comfort = use. Don't even get me started on Search!
Cheers
Ben
Ben – With your experience in navigation design, I would really appreciate a series of articles from you on real world situations you have run into. Let me know if you have time, and I’ll get your setup. Thanks. — Mark
We are talking about ‘Navigation’ with SharePoint. Here is my ‘two cents’ about navigation. I work in a hospital with a staff of approximately 4,000. It is a military hospital with both military and civilian Doctors and Nurses and other support staff. Each department, clinic and section has a SharePoint site. We are using MOSS and our current policy (my instructions from the Command Group), is to make as easy as possible for the ‘Doctors and Nurses’ since they have patients to worry about not SharePoint. I had to come up with different ways to make it easy. I went as far as setting up a PowerPoint presentation and posted it to our IT Department SharePoint help site. I get calls every day from someone from our staff asking “How do I”, I remote to their computer and show them and direct to our help site. One thing I see here is that if I ‘train’ our staff and show them how to navigate in SharePoint that is half the battle.
It really depends on the content to display. Less is more IMHO. I try to use top navigation tabs and often hide the left QuickLaunch with CSS visibility. The visitor’s eye quickly hits the page center and I like to place a 4 column Content Editor with large friendly icons for common tasks. Fewer words, more graphics. A little javascript hover tooltip for description is handy too. K.I.S.S. principle and people will be able to find their way better.
- Jeff