In one of my previous post I focused on home pages. I briefly explained what they are and in which category they belong to.
In this post I want to talk about pathway pages. Pathway pages are considered the navigation, how to get to the page that I want; the destination page.
Most users are on a hunt when they are in a hurry. The mission is to get to the information quickly and the pathway page is just to get them there.
It’s only when they get to the right place, when the page says “here is the information you came looking for”, that they switch modes from hunting to gathering and are ready to read the information.
The key is to make the pathway page easy to understand so that there is only little to read to get to the information.
A pathway page is like a table of content
- Get a quick overview of what’s offered
- Pick the place that you want to go to
- Use the visitors words and group the items into categories that make sense to the visitor
- Sometimes a short description helps to identify the page you’re going to click on
- If you provide information to increase scent on a pathway page, put it in fragments or bullets
- Don’t include any marketing in pathway pages, there are more likely to be ignored
Three click rule
Have you heard of the “three click rule”? It isn’t a rule; it’s a myth. There is no magic number to get as fast as you can to the destination page. People will willingly go beyond three clicks if they are confident of the scent of the pathway they are on. In fact, if they are moving steadily on a successful path, they won’t realize if it took the four of five clicks rather than three.
Many people choose the first option that looks plausible
- Think carefully about the order of information on your pathway pages.
- Put the most important information and links high on the page
- If you want to people to select one link over another, put the one you want them to select first
Many site visitors are landing inside your site
Not always visitors land on the home page. On many web pages visitors come through an external search engine that through the home page. That’s reality.
You have to assume that your information pages inside the site are also going to be the starting point for some of your web users.
Therefore every page in a site should have
- The site’s logo, name, and tag line
- The site’s search box
- The site’s global navigation
- Links to relevant information within the same part of the site and elsewhere on the site
- A clear link to the home page, making it obvious what “home’ that is
