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Stephanie and the rest of the Earley team

So you’ve taken the mega-menu plunge and you now have more labels to fit into your drop-down. How do you make sure it doesn’t look like a mess of text?

There are a couple of options:

Grouping:
Create clear and logical groupings within the menu and give them prominent labels that can easily be scanned.

There are four elements to this approach

1. Logic: Groups have to be internally coherent and logical. Either they are all children of a common parent or somehow conceptually related in a way that is evident and quickly learnable.

2. Labeling: Use simple, unambiguous labels that convey the nature of each group. Decide if your labels will be “clickable” – is there a landing page behind them or is it just a visual way-finder? The mega-menus tend to discourage clicking on such intermediate levels, but marketing may want the space to provide category-level merchandising.

3. Volume: Follow general good practice on number of items in a category. We can thank cognitive science for an easy rule of thumb of 7 +/- 2, but I would say that in a mega-menu, space being limited, I would reduce that to 5 +/-2. This will reduce visual noise and fits well with best practice #1 (less is more).

4. Visual distinction: Use striking colors, increase white space between groups, use shading or dotted lines… anything that you can do to make a visual separation between the groups so that they eye can quickly skip from one group to the other without much thinking.

Let’s look at some examples.

Here’s a screenshot from an office supply site taken a while back:

Aside from the fact that it has far too many terms, it is suffering from not having good visual distinction. It’s hard to distinguish the group labels from the single items below, and some of the terms are a little confusing: ”Basic Supplies”? What makes a message pad a basic supply vs. a paper supply? I’d have a hard time scanning that label and deciding to either skip over that category or make the effort to look at the children.

Compare this to the next version of the same site:

We still have the labeling issue, but notice how this is visually much easier to scan  – I can concentrate just on the bright blue headings to quickly decide where to focus my attention.

Here’s yet another office supply site:

Good: nice visual grouping – flashy orange & capital letters directs attention
Bad: ambiguous labels (organization? how is a post-it organization?), too many terms in one category

This is fun… One more!

Although they’ve tried to use capital letters and some dashed lines, the grey text just doesn’t attract the eye. There are also too many groups and the inconsistent use of multiple groups per column makes it look cluttered and confusing. Another interesting thing to note is that although visually subtle, the use of groupings likely still attracts attention more than the left hand column which has a collection of single choices. I would venture a guess to say that a majority of visitors to this site would ignore the left hand column altogether (except for the A-Z artist block).

Keep in mind that when available, groupings will visually and cognitively trump singles, so avoid mixing the two approaches.

There are some cases in which the mega-menu does not lend itself well to grouping, such as low term volume (in total or per group). If you have 6 categories with only 2 items in each, it can be more visually distracting to have group labels cluttering up the menu. In such cases, an alternative approach is:

Chunking:
Create “chunks” of related terms separated by white space (i.e. with no labels.)

This approach is definately less straightforward and doesn’t give the scanability that grouping with labels does, but it’s better than a big list of undifferentiated terms.

Again, not as effective as labels, but cleaner and more meaningful than a straight list. Underwear, loungewear and socks are clearly related, and so are all the accessory type categories. One might be able to skip over a chunk after scanning only the first few items once you got the gist of its grouping principle.

Here’s what it looks like when you don’t use chunking or even ordering based on grouping principles.

The price points aren’t grouped together… it’s hard to tell whether the items below mean that they are under 50$ (they aren’t)… the tea products are scattered in with other types… Generally messy.

So, to recap:

• grouping is a good way to reduce the amount of work someone has to put in scanning a larger list of items
• use visually distinctive grouping mechanisms
• make sure labels are simple and intuitive
• if you can’t group due to low volume, consider chunking (or at minimum using meaningful ordering)

Next in the series: Best Practice #3: Use simple & concise terminology

This is the question that came up in a conference call last week on SharePoint architecture. This organization had implemented their corporate portal on SharePoint 2007 and was interested in going forward with more portal sites but had some concerns about the approach to information architecture they had undertaken.

I answered what I would answer no matter what technology it was – “Only as many as you really need to implement the appropriate level of metadata, workflow and templates.” Which is of course vague, as most good consultant-ese is. I followed up with some stats: when we work on web content management implementations, we typically end up with about 10-15 content types for a site of medium complexity. We always try to keep the structure simple and number of content types few for many good reasons, ranging from ease of content structure management to content publisher user experience.

The folks on the phone were quiet for a minute… You see, the previous consultant they had worked with had a bit of a different (read opposite) approach. The philosophy they described was that SharePoint content types should be created to the maximum degree of granularity (e.g. one content type per library) so as to reduce the need for content publishers to select a content type and tag metadata values. For example, if you had a site for human resources forms, you would have one library and content type for medical forms, one library and content type for dental forms, etc. Each content type would be extremely specific and require little tagging. “If you need 30,000 content types, then so be it” is the idea. (insert eye twitch.)

The intent behind this – to reduce uncertainty and effort for content publishers – is noble and good, and in some specific cases might be the right approach. But in general, the overly-granular content types seems to be in the realm of sledgehammer to kill a fly. To help explain why, I thought I’d enlist the help of a couple of friends and colleagues.

First, I emailed content management guru Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible, to see if he agreed. His response?

“How many content types is the right number? The fewest possible to squeeze the most value out of the info you possess. If it were my system, I would create a generic type and put all the info that I could not find a business justification for into that bucket. It’s not worth naming if you can’t say clearly why you are managing it. Then I would start with the info we have decided is most valuable and put real energy into naming the type and fleshing out the metadata behind it. Then on to the next most valuable and so on till I ran out of resources. In that way, the effort of typing is spent on the stuff that is most likely to repay the effort.“

Amen to that! But I also wanted to get a tool-specific view from my colleague and SharePoint expert friend Shawn Shell. So I skyped him…

So, what do you think?

Well, having a content type for every document library is certainly an interesting approach, though I think your SharePoint administrators, as well as your users, will go quite mad.

So, I think the argument is that having this many content types is supposed to make it easier on the users by presetting all choices and removing the potential for error. If you never have to choose a content type because each library has a very specific default that matches the content you are creating, then there’s no confusion, the idea seems to be… From a general content management perspective, this is flawed. But what about from a SharePoint-specific standpoint?

I can understand why this might make sense on the surface.  Unfortunately, I think you end up exchanging one kind of confusion for another.  Further, there’s a huge maintenance implication as well. For example, if you have a content type for each library, you are, for all practical purposes requiring the user to decide where to physically store a document.  This physical storage then implies your classification — regardless of whether a default content type is applied.

So, you’re basically recreating all the ills of a fileshare folder structure!

In essence yes. To make matters worse, more complex SharePoint environments will necessarily include multiple applications and multiple site collections. Because content types are site collection bound, administrators will have lots more administration to create, maintain and ensure consistency across the applications and site collection. This would normally be true, but when you have such an overload of content types and libraries, the complexities of management are compounded.

So, if you have 50 content types, and you need to use them in 2 or 3 site collections, you’d have to create 150 content types. Good argument to keep your use of content types judicious. Is there a hard limit to the number of content types one can manage in a site collection?

The answer is “sort of.”  There’s no specific hard limit to the number of content types in a site collection, but there are some general “soft limits” in the product around numbers of objects (generally 2000). This particular limit is an interface limit where users will see slower performance if you’re trying to display more than 2000 items.  The condition won’t typically manifest itself for normal users, but it will for administration. The other real limit is the content type schema can’t exceed 2 Gb.  While this seems like a pretty high limit, if you have a content type for each library, loads of libraries in a site collection and robust content types, there’s certainly a chance to hit this limit.

What about search? I assume that a plethora of content types would have adverse effects on search.

It absolutely does.  Like everything we’ve discussed here, the impact is primarily two fold: 1) administration and 2) user experience. Content types, as well as columns, can be used as facets for search.  If you have an overwhelming number of facets in results, the value facets bring is reduced.  Plus, as I mentioned before, having large numbers of content types could also produce performance problems when trying to enumerate all of the type included in the search result.

From an administrative standpoint, we’re back to managing all of these content types across site collections, ensuring that the columns in those content types are mapped to managed columns (a requirement for surfacing the metadata in search results) and, if you have multiple Shared Services providers, that this work is done across all SSPs.

I expect there will also be a usability issue for those trying to create content outside of the SharePoint interface. Wouldn’t users have to choose from the plethora of content types if they started in Word for?

This is another excellent point.  Often, when discussing solutions within SharePoint, we think only of the web interface. When developing any solution, however, you need to keep both the Office and Windows Explorer interface in mind as well. Interestingly, using multiple document libraries, with a content type for each library, makes a little more sense from the end users perspective, since it’s similar to physical file shares and folders.
However, the same challenges that many organizations are facing related to management of file shares can manifest themselves when using the multiple library and matching content type approach as well — putting these organizations back in the same unmanageable place they started.

Great, thanks Shawn for your insights! I’ll be sure to spread the word to avoid a content type pandemic.

So there you have it folks. As a general rule, less is more. Standardize, simplify and don’t let your content types multiply needlessly. Your content contributors and SharePoint administrators will thank you.

They fly out of website navigation menus with no warning. They assault my senses with link overload.

…they are…mega menus.

Are they a new navigation paradigm or just a bad fad – like acid washed jeans?

And whose idea were they anyways?
It’s difficult to trace the starting point of the mega menu (or mega fly-out, or maxi menu, or whatever you call them); they started popping up on e-commerce sites a couple of years ago. The first one I bumped into one, my brow got that wrinkle it gets when I am at once curious and horrified – horrious? curified? I remember thinking, really? This is what we are doing now instead of putting effort into making our drop-downs more usable? Let’s just add more drop-down…

Once the initial feeling of horriosity passed, I just forgot about it. None of our clients were using them, so I didn’t really have to pay attention. And THEN, this March Jakob Nielsen put out an Alertbox saying “Mega Menus Work Well.” That was really the clincher. If Jakob/NNG says it’s ok, well there goes the neighbourhood.

Since then, we’ve had a couple of clients go down this road. And I’ve kind of gotten used to mega menus… in the way that one gets used to white noise or a bad hair cut. To the point where I think that it’s time that we acknowledged that a lot of websites are using them – for better or for worse – and that they are here to stay until the next navigation fad comes up. So it’s probably a good time to set some basic best practices, to “limit the disasters” (limiter les dégas, as we say in French).

Some of the basic navigation usability principles still apply as-is whether it’s a classic drop-down or a mega menu. But there are definately some new considerations brought about by this new format, and some specifically concerning taxonomy. Over the next few weeks, I’ll begin outlining these mega menu best practices via the blog, and then I’ll wrap it all together in an article.

One caveat. I will likely focus more heavily on the taxonomy and IA side of things rather than visual design or UX. I tried to find a UX colleague to write these with me, but I couldn’t find one who wanted to go on the record as condoning mega menus… which is telling

So off I go with Mega Menu Best Practice #1:

#1. Less is still more: mega menus are not an opportunity or excuse to inundate users

Even Jakob Neilsen admits “just because you can put anything into them doesn’t mean that you should.” I’ve seen some serious abuses of the mega menu… 3-5 column designs with more than 30-40 navigational choices… painful. Although the mega menu gives you more visual space, it is not a free pass to displaying your entire product line on the home page.

It is tempting to think that the mega menu allows you to expose not only level 1 or your navigation, but level 2 as well. However, that causes serious volume issues, so you have to be more judicious about what you include and sometimes even come up with intermediate grouping principles to accomodate the new paradigm. But I’ll talk about those approaches in a future best practice on grouping and labelling.

Here are some examples of good vs. bad volume:

BAD: Way too mcuh content here, 3 very long columns, different navigational principles (by boutique, most popular, by room, etc.). It would take a user a long time to scan all of this and make a choice.

GOOD: Very clean, not too many choices, nice visual separator between product categories and other ways of shopping.

It can be hard to find the right balance.. so much so that some sites have gone down the mega menu road and turned back to classic drop-downs due to an inability to keep them light and clean. Take Target for example: I’ll disclose that the “Good” example here is from their newly redesigned site since I’ll be complimenting them (I was almost disappointed to see they had redesigned – now I have to come up with all new examples.)

Target’s previous design had the biggest, most disorganized and unruly mega menus I’ve ever seen. Here’s the “before” picture for the same category as the “Good” screenshot above:

This wasn’t even the worst offender. Take the Women’s category – 5 columns of grab-bag navigational choices… no visual chunking help, lack of consistent organizing principles…

On their new and improved site, Target uses mega menus at level 1 and 2 of their navigation much more sparingly. Sometimes it’s just a simple drop-down, but where it is a mega-menu, they are cleaner, leaner and much easier on the users:

Target – Women’s Navigation Level 1

Target – Women’s Navigation Level 2

Target is an excellent cuationary tale for best practice #1… Less is still more.