Simplicity: How street signs can inspire your website navigation
I took a road trip with my husband recently and because it’s summer in the Midwest, U.S.A., you can bet that this summer — as always — comes in a love/hate package: Fun in the sun, time in the pool, kayaking on the lake…and construction zones.
If you’re not familiar with construction zones, they add time to road trips with their slower speed limits and one-lane roads. But as we drove along, I took note of the signs that whizzed by — Road Work 1,000 Feet Ahead, Reduced Speed Ahead, One Lane Road.
Road signs don’t need many definitions. They’re short and sweet, and they tell you exactly what to do or what to expect. Think about common road signs you see like:
- Road Work Ahead
- One Way
- Wrong Way
- Stop
- Yield
- Slow
- Speed Bumps
- Keep Left
- No Right Turn
The list goes on. But can you imagine if a verbose stakeholder got a hold of these signs?
“Well, we can’t just say ‘road work ahead’ — it needs to be clear, specifically, what they’re doing. Citizens should know if we’re pouring cement or painting lines. Make sure to add what we’re doing on the sign.”
“We should make sure people know it’s one-way only because that’s how we organized the town. Also, the one-way means you can only park one-direction. Add that so it’s clear.”
“It’s not descriptive enough to say ‘slow.’ We should tell them why. There could be children playing, basketballs rolling into the street, pets in the area, people walking, and more. We should define and explain why it’s important to drive slow.”
If you were the sign strategist or designer, you’d know these requests aren’t necessary.
Too many words will clutter the signs, making it hard to read at fast speeds.
You’ll have to capture too many possible scenarios for road work, which is an extra cost and more work to put out at the right construction zones.
All in all, it just doesn’t make sense when you can do it much more simply.
So whoever made road signs as to-the-point as they often are, I salute them. Whether it’s a few words or a picture, they make sense to almost every person in every language. They’re accessible and inclusive to all.
The history of street signs, care of esurance.com:
In 1922, representatives from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Minnesota toured several states in order to generate ideas for uniform signs and street markings. They made it their goal to develop a system that matched unique shapes to specific messages. This would make signs more helpful in the nighttime, especially as drivers could identify shapes before reading the signs’ words.
If only website navigation and content were this straightforward. If only we could get out of our own way and pave a path to simplicity at every stage of the online experience.
Review your search trends
Thanks to experts like the Nielsen Norman Group, we know bad navigation can lead to confusion for users — just like bad road signs could really cause problems for drivers.
This happens when we assume we know what our users want.
If you have site search on your website — or even if you don’t — reviewing trending searches can be a helpful way to see what language, words, or phrases your audience uses to find content. If you don’t have site search analytics enabled on your website (and you should, tsk-tsk), check Google’s related searches or Google Trends to see what terms people are more likely to use.
This data is integral. If you’re not building a navigation experience that resonates with real people, you’re losing an opportunity to connect.
Divide and conquer with card sorting
Getting data analysis and direct feedback from your users is always the best way to solve navigation issues. But even if that doesn’t work, take an inventory of what you have today and work with colleagues, stakeholders (and hopefully users) to categorize this content. This process is called card sorting.
Once you have your categories, tasks, pages, and topics, ask yourself and the participants:
- How is this information best grouped?
- How would you describe some of these pieces of information?
- What makes some content/pages/features stand out from others?
- What common themes do you see arise from this task?
Putting your answers, topics, and pages on Post-Its or note cards is perfectly acceptable, too. In fact, the more visible it is, the more it will make sense to everyone involved.
When it’s all over, write down the data you uncovered and keep the information and trends nearby to present your data later, if needed. Sharing your card sorting experience can be helpful when getting approvals from other teams or stakeholders.
Don’t clutter the space
And, like too many road signs, too much navigation or crowded navigation can make it confusing for the person you’re trying to help.
Stuffing too much in your navigation can cause choice or decision fatigue, defined by Optimizely as the mind becoming “fatigued after a sustained period of decision making.” Making choices is taxing on our brains, and can lead to no decision at all (or the wrong one altogether).
And like a road with too many signs to digest as you’re driving, having too many options for users can be exhausting. That’s why card sorting, user testing, and keyword research are so valuable for crafting the best navigation experience you can.
When possible, space out your options. Work closely with your designer (or if you’re a designer, tap the knowledge of a content strategist or information architect) to include a tertiary or footer navigation that can help take the pressure off the primary navigation. Consider display approaches, such as hamburger menus or drop-down navigation where appropriate.
Benchmark, rebuild, track, and repeat
Keep your data together. Inevitably, stakeholders are going to want to know why you’re making recommendations, and where the information is coming from. By keeping your data neat and orderly, you can quickly spin it up for a report to share what you found.
Take benchmark data before and after the changes to see if things are working. Once you’ve got sign-on from the proper “authorities,” start rebuilding. Change your categories and navigation, and set up proper redirects for any URLs that are changing, too.
Get out of the way
You don’t need many words to make an impact, you just need the right words. Get out of the way of your consumers and give them what they’re looking for, not what you think your brand should push to them.
If you’re not sure where to start, check out this guide for planning your website architecture.