My most recent client wanted, basically, a sitemap on the left side of every page in the site *AND* he wanted a horizontal top navigational bar in addition to it. My boss does wonders in dealing with fussy clients, and she convinced him that such a system actually makes navigation harder than easier for the typical user. After 2 (or may have been three) revisions, he was happy with what he was seeing. The convincing of the confusion of his navigational system didn't come from us, per say, (you know, the people that deal with this stuff on a daily basis) but by a few test drive users who raised concerns. While some people won't care what you say because they know best, they'll take their advice from a person who knows little if nothing of accessibility. Go figure.
Suckerfish is decent if she absolutely needs the drop-downs feel. With 3 or 4 levels of navi, not only are tiers 3 and 4 going to reduce their hit count and/or annoy users for the simple fact that web users are lazy and want ease in navigation generally and not completeness, but the dropdowns won't come up at all for users without JS enabled. Without a second form of navigation, they'll be high and dry (if your client is using this as a sole means of navigation).
I'm basing off speculation, but I'd also assume that 3 or 4 levels of navigation will not appear semantically correct to CSS-disabled browsers either. This will cause problems to the 4.0 crowd, though I care less and less about them daily :).
I don't know what you mean by "solid" sources, since concern over this type of stuff comes from the very people who are members on this list, but if you look into Zeldman's archives and a couple of the other brand-namer's archives, like mezzoblue, maninblue, meyerweb, etc -- chances are they'll have at least mentioned something of this issue.
As for my "professional" advice, I try my hardest to stay away from JS in general, but *especially* in a navigational sense. I believe all users should at least be able to navigate a website, even if they aren't capable of relishing its bells and whistles. Using JS for navigation will screw some people (a very small number, but some nonetheless) out of a positive experience of finding information. Sure, allow the page to render crappily and still be readable, but don't by any stretch *deny* a user his/er navigational abilities.
--
Ryan Christie [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.theward.net
Justin French wrote:
Hi all,
I'm quoting for a client at the moment who seems to have her heart set on dropdown menus for the sites navigation. I've implemented such menus before, and am currently using a version of the Suckerfish menus [1], which is fine for a one-deep hierarchy, but it looks like she wants 3-4 levels of depth in the menus, which is going to:
- significantly increase development time and testing time - decrease browser compatibility & accessibility
I would also speculate that menus with such deep hierarchy would confuse and distract users.
But we all know how difficult it is to convince a client that they're wrong, especially when they see huge hierarchical menus on other corporate sites. So instead, I'd like to read up (and point her to) any studies conducted in terms of their usability in context of website navigation, perhaps even compared to other forms of navigation.
I have no doubt that such menus ARE usable (we use them every day in Windows, Mac OS, etc), but as pointed out recently on this list (or another?), the menus in our OS are not *navigational* -- they're *functional*.
I'm confident I can provide simple, smart navigation without them, but first I need to find some solid proof that they're a bad idea :)
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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