[Sigia-l] Tab Navigation Structures

[Austin Govella]

> .... we're exploring using a navigation
> structure that includes tabs for a large project I'm on. However, unlike
> Amazon or Apple, we're toying with the idea of the tab (when clicked)
> opening the first/top item in the secondary navigation. Clicking on,
> say, a tab marked Research wouldn't bring you to a main page called
> Research, but rather to the first area under the Research umbrella
> (News). Rolling over the tab (which you would obviously have to do
> before clicking it) would reveal all the secondary navigation, so it
> wouldn't be as if the user was dropped blindly onto a page that had no
> relation to what she just clicked on.

I come across this frequently on the web, and it never fails to throw me. 
I click on the word "research" and I'm brought not to "research," but to 
"news." It only takes me a moment to figure out that I'm now in the news 
area of the research section, but I have to take a moment.

It violates the user's expectation, an expectation you've explicitly 
generated. This violation disrupts the user's mental flow, and throws a 
hitch in their experience. In my view, those are the things good IA  
prevents and avoids.

And it might go beyond an expectation founded on the label for a link. I 
fully expect, when I click on a section heading, especially if additional 
drop-down items are present, that I will see an overview of the content 
and applications within that section, and that I'll be able to find my way 
to what I want.

If I wanted news, I would select news. If I select research instead, then 
I want research.

I do frequently hit similar problems, most frequently with news. I hate 
having a separate news page for infrequent organizational news. Usually I 
squeeze news like this into a column on the overview page. A brief teaser 
links to the full article.

For my purposes, this continues to work pretty well. The overview page 
presents and overview, as well as offering relevant highlights for that 
section (the news). It has failed on a couple of occasions, but usually, 
this was because I failed to build an architecture that'd scale enough to 
accommodate adding news at a later date.

--
Austin