In Part #2 of this article we discussed the contribution of "transparency" to the quality of a landing page. In this (the third part) we shall address the role of navigation .
3. Navigability
Why does navigability enter into the calculation of page ranking? Or in other words, how does navigability enter into the question of page quality?The answer to this lies in the question of "quality of experience" for the visitor. If a website has bad navigation, then a visitor's experience of that website will be diminished. Remember all of this stems from Google's interest in the quality of experience for visitors to their SERP (search engine results page). If clicking on an ad leads to a page which makes the visitor regret clicking on the ad in the first place, that reflects badly on Google. And more importantly, if visitors have a bad experience clicking on ad buttons they will be less likely to click on future ad buttons. And, dear reader, is Google being paid per view or per click?
I'm really not as cynical as the above may sound. I am more of a realist. A cynic has an attitude attached to the observation. I'm just making the observation. Good experience leads to repetition of that action that lead to that experience. Bad experience leads to avoidance of whatever action lead to the experience. Google wants people to click on ads, so they want the landing pages those ads lead to to yield a good experience for the visitors. Simple math.
In this case we are looking at the role of navigation in the creation of a positive user experience.
Why is navigation so important? Why does it have so much impact? The reason is simple once you think about it: navigation is typically the only means the visitor has to actively interact with your website.
Think about it, what is available for the visit to do on your website. They can look, read, scroll, and click things. Scrolling gives the reader some sense of control and interaction with your website. But, scrolling is something that is usually handled automatically by the browser. So mostly you are safe in this regard. But heed my warning, if you find some new way to mess around with the natural order of things and change how your page scrolls you can enter into whole new worlds of visitor dissatisfaction.
So basically clicking on links is pretty much the only means that your average visitor can interact with the average web page.
Do you like feeling out of control, at a loss, helpless, confused, and at the mercy of a heartless or idiotic system? No. We get enough of that at home, work, and from our government. So when we are browsing it would be nice to have a navigation experience that doesn't lead to the above mentioned (less than ideal) experience.
So what can you do to help provide a quality user experience when it comes to navigation of your website.
- Provide a short and easy path.
- Make sure that whenever a user clicks on a link that click action leads to fast response -- in this case quick load of the web page.
Provide a short and easy path.
No body likes to click and click and click in order to drive down a page hierarchy on an endless hunt for the final destination page. K.I.S.S. -- Keep it simple, stupid.Optimize Load Time
Load time effect user experience in several ways. First of all there is the obvious aspect of not wanting to wait for a page to load. No one likes this. A second and less obvious aspect of load time involves the communication cycle between the user and the computer/internet. Click and load is the basis of a simple communication cycle between a user and the internet. I click something happens. But when does that something happen. If the time delay between click and something happening is too long -- I am not happy. Or, in other words, the longer the delay between click and load the lower the quality of my experience.There is more than one delay in this click and load thing.
- Confirmation that my click is doing something.
- Start of page load.
- Mostly loaded.
- Page load finished.
Confirmation that my click is doing something
When I click I want to see an instantaneous response that tells me the click did something. Unless you use javascript, this part is almost always instantaneous. If you use javascript it is possible to create a situation in which a click leads either to no response or to delayed response (while the javascript is thinking.) This is bad.Start of page load
Start is page load is defined (by me) as the moment that some words first appear on the browser screen.Mostly loaded
Mostly loaded to me is defined as that moment when the text content has been loaded and the style sheet cosmetic arrangement of the page has occurred. At this point the only remaining elements to download should be images and other multimedia.Page load finished
This is the moment when all of the graphics are available for viewing and the visitor can start scrolling and poking around the page. Ideally you want the page to finish loading as quickly as possible. This after all is the end result the visitor is looking for.The following elements contribute to the above mentioned delays. I shall address this in a separate article (or series of articles.)
- State of the internet
- User connectivity.
- Database load
- Layout
- Javascript
- Widgets and feeds
- Image sizes
