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August 1, 2010
 

User-centered design in a nutshell

Ouch... Yeah...

Tumblr_l6dg6t5cf71qzpwi0o1_500

(from XKCD, via Currents)

The UW site is better than most. It has a fairly good global nav to get to most of the things people look for (though it can take a bit of digging). 

What if big websites published their sitemaps? Sure, I could search for "UW application forms" and poke through the results for the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Waterloo, etc.  But wouldn't it be cool if I could just call up the sitemap for UW and search within that for relevant pages? Maybe even download the navigation to my bookmark bar if it's a site I use frequently so that I could quickly navigate to the pages I need?

Would someone work on that, please?

Posted by Stuart Maxwell 

Comments (3)

Aug 02, 2010
Emily Oxenford said...
I never thought about how a sitemap might fix this problem. It would have to be a well done one, though, because most of the time they seem incomplete and more confusing than helpful - or perhaps that's just me.

My workaround to this particular breakdown? Whenever I want to find something on the UW site, I use a Google search like "application forms site:washington.edu". I love Google.

Aug 02, 2010
Stuart Maxwell said...
Well... I guess what I want isn't really a site map the way they're usually done as much as I want access to the full hierarchy...not just the navigation that the site designer thinks is important enough for the global nav. I'd like to be able to either drill down (or search) through the hierarchy, to see the page topics without seeing the page content. You can only do that to a limited extent from the global nav.

And if this were automated and not dependent on a designer to lay out the map, it would be hella convenient to be able to "subscribe" to the site's navigation so that I could poke through the table of contents, click to go directly where I want in the hierarchy, and star my favorite links within the tree.

Reading Pull has me thinking about stuff like this. What if information in a domain wasn't something *you publish* as much as something *I access*. A subtle difference, but a potentially profound shift in the way we structure and access information online.

I want site-specific browse, I guess. In the meantime, I agree... site-specific search is the best alternative.

Aug 02, 2010
Emily Oxenford said...
Seems the entire point of user-centered design is precisely that subtle difference between the "you publish" and "I access". Which I think is the point you were trying to make.

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