Positive Trends in User Experience: Panel Navigation

Jonathan Firestone — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:46:47 +0000

I refer to Mega dropdowns as “Panel Navigation”. It’s much more descriptive. But I do think of it as a huge opportunity to inform the user about the content that lies ahead. You might know this UX pattern by another name. In March of 2009, Jacob Nielson summarized mega dropdowns as “Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels [that are] group[ing] navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user’s choices.”

Reuters navigation panel example: Opinion category panel

Reuters.com’s implementation of them (as you can see to the right) is probably one of the best and most widely used examples of how you would make use of this type of panel navigation. In this instance, we’re looking at a story within the Reuters site. Imagine that the user has clicked on a link posted to twitter to read an opinion article. The user examines the content seen here, and decides they’d like to see what else catches their fancy. The user then rolls over the navigation and instead of making the user guess as to what might be interesting to them based on simple titles, or more content categories (or topics), the user is presented with something that is entirely different and a hundred times more usable and appealing. A navigation panel that incorporates content into the mix is much more engaging and informative to the user. In this example, the navigation panel is divided into four columns. In the first a few of the biggest active stories within the category of Analysis & Opinion. It appears to be a short-list of stories dedicated to summaries which fall under the Analysis portion of the content. Columns dedicated to “Breakingviews” and “Opinion” feature friendly faces and names of columnists along with the title of their latest column. The column to the far right contains a list of various columns and varied sections of interest within this category set.

Typical Dropdown Navigation Example (From the Washington Post)

This kind of navigation improvement is much more usable than something like what you see to the left. The questions I have to ask are “Is this informative?”, “Does the user understand what will happen next?” I think anything you can do to help the user remain engaged is a good idea, and as you can see this news organization has a dropdown for navigation, but it’s pretty typical. Regardless of how good the information architecture is, the risk you are taking is that the user won’t want to look much farther for items of interest, nor will they have an interest in subsections which might have a lot more to offer the user than just a simple topic. Immerse the user in your world. You’ve got nothing to lose, and technology like this, once you have a syntax to follow can be very easy to implement and maintain. Regardless of what you do, you should test it against your users, just as Mr. Nielsen recommends.

Document Template for RFP Responses

Jonathan Firestone — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:05:37 +0000

Hi Folks.

A friend commenting on Social media blog asked if anyone knew of any templates that might be freely available for what I presumed was an interactive company responding to an RFP. I wanted to help him out, so I threw a template together based on some of my successful attempts at producing a workable RFP response. I don’t warrant the work or the results, but have at it. If you’re interested I provide you with: a Template for RFP Response, version 0.4A, off a page reserved for templates off my blog. I hope it’s worthy of praise or gentle criticism. Would love to get your feedback. I’ll update it and I will provide others at this location as I go. Also, feel free to tweet and retweet as necessary.

http://jonathanfirestone.com/document-templates/

Cheers.

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Positive Trends in User Experience: Panel Navigation

Document Template for RFP Responses