Twice while building this site we tried to give readers a map, and twice we cut it. The first was a value map for the home page, a single picture meant to show every path through the material at once. The first version drew it as a tall, branching shape, and it looked considered in isolation. In use, it made the reader scroll down to study an unfamiliar layout and work out how to read it before it told them anything, so we rebuilt it as a plain horizontal path. The second was a small subway map on the course pages, meant to show progress through a level. It was compact and it was clever, and it asked the reader to learn a new metaphor for something a simple list already showed. We replaced it with the list.
The pattern in both was the same, and it is the lesson worth keeping.
A navigation that makes the reader learn a new mental model has to pay for it, and most do not. When in doubt, use the layout the reader already knows.
Every unfamiliar structure is a small tax on attention, and the reader pays it up front, before reaching the content. A new metaphor for the menu, a new form for the progress bar, a new way of arranging the table of contents: each one asks the reader to stop and learn the interface as a prerequisite to learning the material. Sometimes that is a fair trade, because the new structure genuinely shows something a familiar one cannot. Often it is not, and the clever version is buying the builder a feeling of originality at the reader's expense.
On an education site the calculation tilts hard toward the plain layout, because attention is the exact resource you most want spent on the lesson. Anything the reader burns on decoding the navigation is gone from the thing they came for. The test we ended up using is a single question: does this structure tell the reader something the ordinary one cannot. When the honest answer was no, the familiar layout won, every time, and the site reads better for it. Cleverness in the wayfinding is a cost the reader pays, and it has to be earned.
Where this goes next
Why a familiar structure lowers the load a reader carries, and why that matters most when the material is already demanding, is the mental-models thread of our essay The Human Factors and the human-factors part of The Builder's Stack. The broader instinct, cutting the clever thing when it does not earn its place, is the subject of What We Built for This Site and Then Deleted.
Sources
- The mental-models principle behind preferring a familiar structure is in our essay The Human Factors.
- The deeper treatment is in the human-factors part of The Builder's Stack.