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Is top navigation still necessary on news sites?

Posted in: Design, Information Architecture, Navigation, New Ideas, Newspapers, Technology, Trends, by: Mario Garcia

Mar 16, 2009
10:06 PM

There are two types of mall visits for me. The first is when I want to pass time or entertain the kids. We browse the storefronts, hit their favorite stores and those awful, bacteria-infested play areas and, of course, the food court. The other kind of visit is when I go with a mission (to buy something) and a purpose (to get out fast). Neither kind of visit involves me stopping to look at the mall directory.

The same applies to how I browse a site on the web. I’m either a loyal visitor to a site, browsing the headlines and photos, clicking on the ones that pique my interest or a user with a purpose, knowing what I want or arriving through a link from my RSS reader or an email alert or the always-reliable Twitter link. Occasionally, I’ll use the search function to find an article about a particular subject or person. Just like my mall visits, neither visit involves me using the top navigation. So it begs the question, does anyone use the top navigation anymore on a news site?

It’s a good question because so much time is often spent trying to organize and create the top navigation of a site. That time could be better used working on writing better headlines and blurbs that get browsers to click. Would more people click on the LOCAL NEWS link or a headline like YOUR NEIGHBOR’S A TERRORIST. NOW WHAT DO YOU DO? My guess, not backed up by any research, is the latter.

I’m certainly not making an argument against organizing content. It’s an important and necessary step in any site design, but the conversations should not be about second or third levels of navigation anymore. They should be about how that site organization translates visually to the entire homepage and the full article pages.

There are some news sites that do a good job of translating the content organization to the entire homepage. The most obvious, in my opinion, is MSNBC.com. While they do employ a vertical navigation, it’s out of the way of the real navigation which is the actual content. As you scroll down, the site offer the best of both worlds for scanners and users who know exactly where they want to go. The modular sectioning lets users quickly find the topic they’re interested in or browse all of them, check out the main story for each, other headlines, multimedia and other popular topics for that day. There’s even the option of shifting the order of these modules so you can get right to the ones you want to see most.

MSNBC.com section module

Newser.com is becoming a daily habit for me. It’s one of the best news aggregators on the web. There are so many things I like about Newser.com, but the way they use their top navigation speaks to who they are and the experience they want to create for the users—get what you need fast. Their top navigation offers the three biggest stories of the day, a drop downs for the other sections, hot topics and sources. Clean, easy and most importantly, USEFUL. While it’s not the best design aesthetically, the entire homepage of Newser.com offers a rich, visual content-based navigation. The top navigation here functions not to highlight the sections on the site, but the most popular headlines.

Newser.com

Of course, The New York Times site also encourages users to navigate through headlines. I couldn’t even imagine trying to organize all the great content the NYT offers into a single horizontal line of useful navigation items. I think it would be a mistake to try. The grid-based design makes it easy to browse the homepage, despite the amount of content, and chances are you’ll find all you need or want. Today’s homepage features the NCAA tournament coverage prominently. No need to get there though a clumsy three-step navigation process (SPORTS » COLLEGE » BASKETBALL). And if all that isn’t enough there’s the great index near the bottom of the page organized by category featuring the top headlines from those sections, which is much more useful than the navigation along left side of page.

Nytimes.com index

In contrast, and more to my point, I love the Guardian site. It’s clean, easy to scan and most importantly always features great content. They absolutely do a good job of visually translating the great content organization to the entire page, which means users will stay longer. It also means a user like me doesn’t have to use the top navigation. We don’t scan topics, we scan headlines.

Guardian.co.uk header

I’ve been a huge fan of CNN.com’s design, but this is another example where the index of headlines is more useful than the topic navigation. But one navigation element of this site that is very useful is the HOT TOPICS area in the header that lists the important items of the day and link you to a page that is a wonderful directory of topics, people and places in the news.

Cnn.com header

I wonder if any of the sites listed above would suffer without the top navigation? My own browsing experience with all of these sites does not include the top nav. And my familiarity with the homepage structure helps me find exactly what I am looking for. So like that mall directory, I’m finding less and less use for the top navigation, especially one that is cluttered, three layers deep and makes me work to find what I need, which is counter to its intended purpose.

It’s been said and written several times, users don’t want to work at finding the content they want. Some may argue that eliminating the top navigation makes users do just that - work to find what they want. But a homepage that is segmented, organized and consistent has the potential to create less work than a cumbersome top nav bar.

The other argument is a financial one. Advertisers want impressions and the way to get that is get users to click through several pages. Good for revenue, bad for user experience. Solid design and organization from homepage to article page, not to mention great content accomplishes good click-through and longer visits.

A top level of navigation should not be taken for granted. If the design is not organized it becomes necessary as a way for users to get through the site. But, in this day and age, if a user has to click on SPORTS to find NCAA tourney information in late March, then there are other flaws in your process and site organization you may want to reconsider.

So I put the question to anybody else. Is top navigation still necessary on news sites?