DesignUsability
Don’t use “quick links”
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Filed under Design, Usability
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Does your website contain quick links? These are usually found in the form of a drop-down menu somewhere on the Home page. The menu simply provides links to commonly visited pages within your site.
“Slow links”?
You might think that quick links help your visitors to navigate your site - and indeed they may. But they also do something else: Quick links undermine your site’s primary navigation.
If the purpose of your quick links menu is to help visitors to find pages that they are likely to be searching for, then ask yourself: What is your primary navigation for? Having a quick links menu shows that you haven’t put enough thought into your main navigation.
Your site’s primary navigation should provide your visitors with easy access to the most important parts of your site, which should include the pages that are important to them. If a page is worth adding to a quick links menu, than it’s worth making more accessible through your main navigation.
What about promoting temporary content?
I have seen quick links menus that feature temporary content - such as an annual report - that visitors might be searching for at a particular time, pages that might not belong in the primary navigation.
The appropriate place for content like this would be in a News section. It’s a great idea to have a news section on your Home page; if there’s something going on currently that you wish to promote, publish a news item about it.
This gives you the added benefit of promoting that item through your News subscription feed, something that a quick links menu would not do. With a good content management system, you can also control how long that news item remains on your Home page.
Internal politics
Often in the development of their websites, organizations make the mistake of designing the primary navigation with the organization’s promotional objectives in mind, while the audience’s objectives are considered only as an afterthought, eventually taking the form of a quick links menu after the Web guy takes a look at the visitor stats.
This is a symptom of contamination from internal politics in your information architecture. Remember: your website’s purpose is not just to promote your organization, but to make a connection with your audience. Give your audience what they want from you.
