[Sigia-l] top level navigation by user type

[Jared M. Spool]

At 01:55 PM 10/28/2003 -0800, Stephanie Hornung wrote:
>i've found that a lot of government websites are organized by these user
>groups, and the person i'm working under at the agency wants to design it
>this way, but i'm not sure its the best idea.  does anyone have any
>information/opinions regarding how well this type of navigation works?

Hi Stephanie,

We've studied many sites with this type of home page organization and I can 
tell you that it rarely works the way the designers intend, especially for 
government sites.

As others have said, users primarily come to the site to accomplished 
focused goals. When the site uses a user-type scheme, it forces the users 
to guess where the designers might have hidden a particular resource or 
function.

I suggest you look at http://www.bls.gov as an example of a government site 
that tests very well with the different user communities its serves, while 
taking a very task-oriented approach.

I hope this was helpful,

Jared


Jared M. Spool        User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com
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