Navigation creep
Despite the best of intentions, I finally had to admit that a major client's site had succumbed to navigation creep. It started innocently: add a button here and there, but only logical extensions of what we already had. Fast forward a couple-dozen "logical" extensions, and the home-page now has 19 buttons and 20 text links. Add up the form fields and submit buttons, and you've got 56 objects for users to click on.So, I'm left with one recourse: wipe the hard drive and redesign. As I'm digging into it, though, I'm realizing just how much this is more of a qualitative problem than quantitative. In the early days of usability, it was all about numbers: "don't use more than 7 buttons", "don't go deeper than 3 clicks", etc. Of course, what really matters is context. Dozens of text links may be fine, if they're grouped clearly and you can understand the chunk quickly and easily. If the user sees a list of 50 "Topics" and isn't interested in browsing topics, they can move on. On the other hand, a page with 10 text links, all in different fonts, placed randomly on the page, and with no apparent relationship to each other, would scare off the average Joe user in no time flat.
