2.8 Ensure Navigation and Way-Finding Are Well-Structured
Information architecture is a central part of the Web development process, and how you structure a website ensures that people can way-find your content easily. Having appropriately marked-up links within your product or service allows visitors, search engines, and social networks to identify key information quickly.
Criteria
- Navigation And Search: Provide an accessible, easy-to-use navigation menu with search features that help visitors easily find what they need.
- Navigable Sitemaps: Implement an efficient (human-readable) sitemap that is organized and is regularly updated. This helps search engines better index website content, which helps visitors more quickly find what they are looking for.
- New Content: Implement a way for visitors to find out about new content and services.
Impact
Low
Effort
Low
Benefits
- Environmental:
Efficient navigation with intuitive search features means visitors spend less time and energy finding what they require and accomplishing tasks. This also lowers emissions. - Accessibility:
Accessible navigation improves the user-experience for people with disabilities. Being able to find the correct pages quickly also helps to reduce data wastage. - Performance:
Efficient website structure has an impact on performance in that people can more quickly find what they require. This doesn’t necessarily mean pages or assets load faster, but if appropriate way-finding mechanisms are in place, less time on-screen can result, which is beneficial for emissions. - Economic:
If visitors more quickly find what they need, this could potentially reduce hosting costs if those are based on data transfer. - Conversion:
Good website structure and navigation can also improve conversion rates if more people find what they require. This could also be true if visitors are alerted to new content they have expressed interest in.
GRI
- materials: Medium
- energy: Low
- water: Medium
- emissions: Low
Example
- Information Architecture of a Website Sitemap.
Resources
- An Excellent Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture
- Build and submit a sitemap
- Building Accessible Menu Systems
- Digital Eco-Design: Eco-Conception: Content
- Find And Add Your Sitemap
- [GPFEDS] 4.3 – UX and UI (Optimized Clickstream) (PDF)
- GreenIT (French) 4008 – Mettre en place un sitemap efficient
- How UX design can help tackle climate change
- Menus Tutorial
- OpQuast 1 – The website provides a way for users to find out about new content and services.
- OpQuast 213 – The website provides a sitemap file listing the content to be crawled.
- UX: Best Practices For Developers