The Importance of Navigation?

I have a confession to make. When I’m driving through cities, I tend to get lost. It doesn’t matter if I have driving directions printed out from Google Maps, Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, or other map services to help guide me. As a result, I tend to miss signs that are hard to see, get distracted by pedestrians walking out in front of me. I find myself in the middle of funeral processions. I also often pull over in strange and sometimes very unsafe looking places to find where I’m at, through the web on my phone. But that’s not what I’m confessing to. This is a complaint about the importance of navigation.

My confession is that I’m fixated on the importance of navigation. That is whether street navigation or Website navigation. I’m convinced that one of the solutions to high energy consumption in the United States could get fixed if the transportation offices of major cities were smarter about the importance of navigation. Use signs to help drivers navigate through their roads.

I think better signage could make metropolitan roads safer and reduce congestion. Maybe I’ve looked at too many websites and how the navigation on those pages can make it easier or harder to find what you’re looking for. On a website, though, if I have trouble finding what I’m looking for, I can easily find a way home. When I’m lost in the middle of Camden, New Jersey, it’s not as easy (or as safe).

How Well Does Web Indexing Improve Navigation on Sites?

You would think that the many mapping and driving directions services on the Web would help. I wish they would.

Some recent experiences relying on services like Google Maps tell me otherwise.

I spent a couple of hours driving around on a recent trip to Annapolis, Maryland, to find the Maryland State Archives building. I drove past the building I was looking for 7-8 times but never realized that I had. Google Maps told me to look for it on one side of a major road when it was actually across the street. It didn’t help that it was a Saturday afternoon, and a Navy football game was about to start, with pedestrians and heavy street traffic everywhere.

I finally found signs for the Annapolis Visitors’ center and stopped by there to ask for directions. The people running the office conferred for about 20 minutes and gave me a map with the location circled. It was then that I realized that Google had misled me. Then again, the 6 or 7 people I tried to ask for directions before I got to the visitor’s center didn’t know where the building was either. So much for relying on social networks and the wisdom of crowds.

On my way back from Annapolis, my Google Maps directions for Washington DC told me to make a left turn on Sixth Street and stay on it until Constitution Avenue.

  1. Turn left to merge onto US-301 S/US-50 W toward I-97 Continue to follow US-50 W Entering District of Columbia 27.3 mi 6. Turn left at 6th St NW 0.8 mi
  2. Turn right at US-50 W/Constitution Ave NW Continue to follow US-50 W

As I approached Sixth Street, I saw a “no left turn” sign. Undeterred, I drove past and made the first right, followed by the next first right, and then another right onto Sixth Street. I worry a little when I see directions like that in Google Maps and think about Google’s driverless cars.

Sometimes There is a Lack of Navigation Signals

Another navigation problem that disturbs me is the lack of numbers on buildings. Why do so many businesses fail to put their street numbers in an easy place to see from the road? When you’re driving along, looking for a specific address, and almost every building you drive past displays their name in bright neon or large golden arches but fails to show their number, you end up doing a lot of u-turns. It’s really shameful to spend an hour driving to someplace. And then another hour trying to find that place once you’re within a mile or two.

I usually copy the phone number of places I’m trying to visit on my printout of driving directions so that I can call and have them guide me to the last mile or so once I feel suitably lost and frustrated. There are websites like that, where once you arrive, and it seems like they might have something you’re interested in, you can’t find it. This seems to happen to me a lot on government websites for some reason.

Sometimes There Are Problems With Navigation

A problem I tend to experience more in rural settings is rustic street signs. Instead of the standard-looking road signs that tell you which road you’re looking for, or passing, some communities thought it would be a good idea to draw attention to their unique charms with unusual signs that are both hard to see and hard to read. For example, there’s a heavily wooded area around the border between NorthWestern Delaware and Pennsylvania with narrow curving country roads. The street signs tend to be wooden plaques, painted hunter green, often twisted at unusual angles.

Because of this, if you’re lucky enough to see one amongst the tree leaves, you pretty much have to stop to read it.

It’s a little like a link on a webpage that’s the same color as the text surrounding it and doesn’t have underlines or some other decoration that makes it stand out in any way.

The web is a collection of interconnected documents. The links between pages deliver us from one place to another. Sometimes this gets done blindly. It can take place with great skill and forethought. So it’s an area where the importance of navigation is essential to keep in mind when you are organizing pages of a site.

What Search Results Contain

When a search engine displays search results, it shows us a combination of the page title, snippet, and URL (and some additional information) for the pages it lists in results. A well-written page title and persuasive snippet may distinguish whether someone clicks on a result to visit or chooses another page from a different site.

When you’re doing keyword research for a site, one of the things you should be thinking about when choosing keyword terms and phrases for specific pages is how appropriate and use those terms might be when they appear in links to pages. That is either within navigation links or in a link within the content of a page.

Do your site navigation and the words you use in links help visitors to your site understand what they might find on the pages of that site? (Keep the importance of navigation in mind.) Do they help pinpoint the places that may be set aside specifically for them and what they are looking for? Do they give browsers an idea of where they are, where they can go, and where they’ve been on your pages?

Do you include an HTML sitemap to provide visitors with an alternative way to find what they might be looking for? Or a site search?

Do You Test Your Navigation?

Do you test your site’s navigation with people who aren’t very familiar with it to see how easy or difficult it might be for them to find something on your pages? Or to see if they can perform certain tasks on your pages?

I’m fixated on the importance of navigation. That is probably a good thing since part of what I do as an SEO is to work to help people find things on the Web.

One of my favorite user design articles that I’ve read is about links on pages and creating links that give visitors to the site confidence about what might get found on the other side of a link. The article is from Jared Spool, on Uie.com, and is Getting Confidence From Lincoln. It makes a strong case for SEOs reading about User experience design because there are some good lessons there.

Have a happy holiday, and if you’re doing any driving over the long weekend, I hope your journey is a good one.