Why is a Navigation Structure so important?
- Ray Pearce (Unlicensed)
The small screens of mobile Internet devices, combined with the increasing complexity of mobile tasks, can create a serious obstacle to usability in the mobile Internet.
The mobile phone/tablet display is not likely to become much larger, for the need for portability will continue to constrain the size of the screen. Since text size cannot be reduced below a threshold of legibility, only a small amount of information can be shown on the screen at a time; on the typical mobile Internet phone, there are fewer than 15 lines vertically and fewer than 12 characters per line.
One way to circumvent the obstacle is to organise an information structure with efficient depth/ breadth tradeoffs.
Due to restrictions on screen real estate and the various input mechanisms used by mobile devices, relying on a traditional multi-column desktop-based layout doesn't work. This is true even for smartphones that accurately render desktop websites. The novelty soon wears off when scrolling through and zooming around desktop-targeted websites.
This is why a simple, vertical navigation structure will improve your user’s experience and ensure that your answerSpace gets adopted enthusiastically.
As a rule of thumb, your navigational structure - that is, the path along which your user travels to get to their desired information, should try to follow the ‘Three Click Rule’ (Zeldman, Jeffery (30 May 2001). Taking Your Talent to the Web: Making the Transition from Graphic Design to Web Design. New Riders. pp. 448. ISBN 978-0-7357-1073-3).
The BlinkMobility Platform easily allows you to create and set up this navigational structure.
Master Categories
Please note: Master Categories have been deprecated in future releases.
The first level of navigation in the BlinkMobility Platform are ‘Master Categories’. These are used when you know that you will have groups of Categories within your answerSpace that may be more easily understood by your users when they are grouped together.
Categories
Categories form the the main Navigational Structure of the answerSpace. Categories are the containers that hold Interactions. They are the method by which the user gets to the final information they wish to access. We guide the user’s steps towards the information they want by inserting Categories into our answerSpace:
The user now has 3 subsequent options depending on which Category they choose - they can opt to tap ‘Buy’, ‘Rent’ or access a previously saved list of Properties under ‘My Starred’:
Rules/Tips
- Categories can link to each other
- If there is only one Interaction in a Category, it will be fired immediately upon click.
- Categories can be hidden or made inactive.
- Categories and Navigation Tags (see the relevant module in the course "Introduction to the Blink Intelligent Client v3) work in tandem.