Have you been inside a Gigantic Mall that has a lot of passage ways going to the other sections of the establishment. Feeling like the Athenian hero Theseus inside a Labyrinth and feeling lost. Well, do not let that happen to your users when they are already deeply inside your site.

Follow the following guidelines to bring them back home:

1. Tell users where they have arrived and how they can proceed to other parts of the site by including these three design elements on every page:

   • Company name or logo in upper left corner

   • Direct, one-click link to the homepage

   • Search (preferably in the upper right corner)

2. Orient the user to the rest of the site. If the site has hierarchical information architecture, the best way to do this is usually a “breadcrumb trail”links that indicate the user’s current location in the context of the site’s hierarchy and allow users to backtrack or move up the hierarchy. Also include links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location, but don’t flood the user with links to all site areas or to unrelated pages.

3. Don’t assume that users have followed a drill-down path to arrive at the current page. They may have taken a different path than what you intended and not have seen information that was contained on higher-level pages.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Design & Usability.