On Apr 22, 2009, at 6:10 AM, Coryndon Luxmoore wrote:
I did some task basted research on a events site geared towards college students. The detailed footer was used by the users when the global navigation was unclear. So it functioned as a backup navigation for the users. The users generally seemed to view it positively though it was not an explicit part of the testing protocol.
For me, whenever someone starts talking about 'backup navigation', I see red flags.
In my opinion, the typical implementations of these footers are only used when something else about the scent of information on the page has failed. It's the same for breadcrumbs and site maps.
Creating a great "detailed footer" or "bottom of page mini site map" is another form of a design cop-out. Instead of fixing the problem with the page's scent, we try to fix it with generic elements.
I'd love to see people telling us that they watched whenever someone used these elements, then repaired the scent on the page so that they were no longer necessary.
That's my opinion -- worth what you paid for it. Jared Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845 e: jsp...@uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561 http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
