Navigation and the Anxious Clicker

Of all the reasons why we leave a website, one of the most common, and least understood, is lack of trust. Mention trust and website in the same sentence and the conversation turns to content. Questions like: Is the site truthful? Is it trying to sell me? Is it promising an experience it cannot deliver? Have I been deceived into visiting? But there's another form of trust. It's about the way we navigate. And it kills more websites than you can imagine.

The structure that wasn't
A website is always one page thick. A book has a cover and multiple successive pages. You can hold it in your hands. You know that page 300 exists because you can feel it, it has physical dimension. With a book then, all trust is centred around content. Page 300 might be blank. It might contain nonsense. It might be printed wrong. But it exists. A website's physical structure is purely imaginary. When we first enter a website, we instantly begin to create a map of the site in our minds. It is a mental device that we learn as children to help us navigate through a three-dimensional world. In effect we imbue the website with three-dimensional qualities. But there is no physical reason to believe in a website's structure at all. None whatsoever.

The pact
It's a fragile pact of trust that we enter into. The designer has created a multi-level cyber structure and we enter that world, assuming that it will conform to the basic human rules of perception and reality. With each page, our trust is either supported or undermined. If supported, our mental map of the structure is expanded and enriched. But if the map is undermined, we'll experience a hitch in our expectation of where we are and where we are being led. For any good human who has learnt the rules of navigation, this desecration of the internal map sets off warning bells, flashing lights, sirens and alarms. One, two clicks at best and we're out of there.

Position, position, position
To navigate in the world, we have two basic requirements. The first is orientation. We need to know exactly where we are. We need to know directions – above and below, front and back, left and right. And we need to know where we are in relation to the objects in the physical world around us. The second is consistency. We need to trust that the bookcase against the wall will stay in the same absolute position no matter where we move. And also that it will remain a bookcase. We won't turn around to find fields of rippling wheat to the horizon. As babies, we spent a great deal of time learning the finer points of orientation. For good reason. Once we felt secure, we could take the next step: learning to move with confidence through the world.

Mapmaker, mapmaker, play me a tune
To navigate, we slowly learned the ability to use mental maps. Over time we became so proficient at using these maps that we took the process for granted. It remains our prime mental tool for navigating through the world. Close your eyes and think of the street in which you live. Did you catch that you have an internal map of the street itself? We store a multitude of these maps. Where we live, where we work, our suburb as whole, specific streets, the rooms of our house or apartment, the way that countries sit in relation to each other. So it was a long, long time before we ever put our hands on a mouse that we learnt the ins and outs of human navigation.

What it all means
Unlike a book or a film, we navigate through a website. One of the internet's greatest revolutions is our freedom to choose our own path, to gather information as we please. And as we are in control, our deeply ingrained rules of navigation kick into action automatically. It doesn't take much to make us an anxious clicker. Why the anxiety? Because there are few things more frightening to us than being disoriented. It literally prevents us from functioning in the world. It's no surprise that we protect ourselves from this at all odds.

So when a website gives the merest hint that it does not uphold our hard won rules of navigation, when it plays with our sense of orientation, anxiety comes a-knocking. It might be mild anxiety but the echo will be there. And we will click to freedom. Worse than that, our experience of the website will become our experience of the business itself. Untrustworthy. Without solid foundations. Unsupportive. And that's probably not an image that any business aspires to.

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

About the Author:
John Samperi is head designer at Samperi Design, a graphic design studio in Sydney, Australia. http://www.samperidesign.com.au This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.