Does your website visitor need a GPS?

There are two kinds of GPSs out there:

1. Navigation GPSRs that help drivers find where they are going and create helpful routes.
2. Sport GPSRs that simply point an arrow to the final destination. You choose the route.

I’ve got a couple sport GPSRs that my family uses to go Geocaching. (And a brand new one just arrived today!!) Part of the fun of geocaching is finding your way and discovering the cache at the end of the hunt. But most people navigating a car would find this type of GPS frustrating, as they’ve got a task to do, not a ‘discovery’ to make.

I bring up GPSs to make you think about navigation and how important it is. Navigation on your website is the same way. Yet, it seems, most industrial websites seem to leave navigation as an afterthought.

While I am modest about my new website, calling it just brochureware, one of our sales reps pointed out how clear it is to navigate compared to the competition. A quick look at the competition, and here are some of the mistakes I saw on home pages or main product pages:

Navigation-to-products mistakes:

1. No obvious starting point.
2. It isn’t obvious which category to choose.
3. Multiple similar-sounding categories (the most common mistake, I think.)
4. What is clickable? Only the product thumbnail??
5. Too much text.
6. Small text links in two columns crammed all together.
7. Categories buried in text.
8. Two systems of categories.
9. Extraneous categories, such as ‘used’, ‘brochures’, ‘demos’
10. Categories that dump into a laundry-list of products. (like 27 text-only links)
11. Just plain bad categories that show no thought about the visitor.

The truth is that people do enjoy hunting for info, to a point. But with each additional click, they are increasingly ready to give up. Getting them to the right category right away is like a Navigation GPS telling you what exit to get off the highway…it gets you going in the right direction.

How to fix?
Limit yourself to six categories. Or eight. I call these ‘buckets’. Then make sure you can fit all your product lines into one of these buckets. Some product-lines may go in two different buckets–figure out if you should cross-list those or adjust your buckets so it only fits in one. Cut, cut, and shuffle until this works. Then come up with short understandable names for each bucket.

Here’s what I’ve got on my website:

• Product categories/buckets: 6, including one catch-all for products that don’t fit the other 5.
• Product families: No more than 6 families per category.
• Products: 1 to 28 products per family.

If your website has this problem, you already know it. Time to go and “cut, cut, and shuffle until it works.” (That is, unless you are my competitor–your site is fine, really.)