The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It • Hacker News Board

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#41

Post by wtetzner » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

Domenic_S wrote: post #24

gnaritas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.

The usability of what? Not a glib question -- if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out, why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar? For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases…

> The usability of what? > why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?

Typically people are looking for information when the visit a brand new site. If the user can't figure out how to get that information, chances are they're going to be frustrated, and have no interest in clicking the button.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#42

Post by jseliger » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #34

jseliger wrote: post #17

Funny that this article should appear: I have been complaining about the Campaign Living website for a while: http://www.campaignliving.com/ . The Campaign Living product concept is very interesting—furniture that's actually comfortable but that can also be taken apart. But there is no nav bar and few details about the product on their site. It's very annoying. Their desktop browser experience feels broken. All this…

Interesting. When I go to campaignliving, I just get two buttons "campain" and "reserve now". The rest is all blank white. I've turned on and off ad-blocking, JS, etc, and it's all the same. While your description of the product sounds like something I'd want, I'll sadly never be able to investigate it. Having a plaintext fallback isn't that hard people!

Oh yeah—I guess this isn't just me. I tweeted to them about the issue: https://twitter.com/seligerj/status/687682195964735488.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#43

Post by Stratoscope » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #4

mentos wrote: post #2

"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away" I installed the new iTunes for my friends dad this weekend when I was helping him with his computer troubles. It took me way too long to find the file menu and it occurred to me in that moment that UI/UX designers have gone too far. In the pursuit of simplicity the marble nose has been chipped off the sculpture…

"Let me push Alt just in case a secret UI shows up" is up there with XKCD's famous "change the screen resolution" troubleshooting strip [1]. It should not be a thing. But here we are. And unfortunately, while the "change the screen resolution" is becoming less common, burying features in undiscoverable places is getting worse and worse. What I hate the most about this is that (unlike aforementioned off-screen dialog…

In a funny coincidence, just a few minutes ago I got an email indicating that an off-screen dialog bug I reported on Windows 8 almost three years ago has been fixed. (Actually I think it was fixed early last year in a Windows Technical Preview build - two years after I reported it!)

I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match:

  +----------------+
  |                |
  |                |
  |    External    |
  |                | +--------------+
  |                | |              |
  +----------------+ |   ThinkPad   |
                     |              |
                     +--------------+

When Windows 8 introduced the new file copy/move/delete dialogs, it also introduced a bug. With this monitor arrangement, the dialog would be displayed offscreen:

  +----------------+
  |                |
  |                | [Dialog]
  |    External    |
  |                | +--------------+
  |                | |              |
  +----------------+ |   ThinkPad   |
                     |              |
                     +--------------+

Oops.

Just like in the XKCD, the modal dialog locked up the File Explorer window that had opened the dialog. After running into this many times I figured out a workaround using keyboard shortcuts to move the dialog back onscreen.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-f...

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#44

Post by nikanj » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #15

To be fair, right where airbnb is cutoff is a massive searchbox for your travel destination. The NYT/news in general, they have navigation but they typically put breaking headlines/articles on the front page with links to othet sections. I assume squares nav goes fixed on scroll. I know that friction is bad, however, I refuse to assume that my users have an IQ of less than a carrot. I am not exactly asking them to sp…

This might be good reading for you http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/15/ui/

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#45

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

tedajax wrote: post #10

Shenglong wrote: post #6

This is a pretty crass statement to make. If the focus is full-on navigability, I agree that contrast in the navigation bar is paramount. Yet, for many sites with simplified features, the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself. This is especially true for sites like Airbnb (as in the example) where in addition to emotional response, there is an immediate focus on activating users. The…

When did sites become "emotional experiences"? I'm sorry I want to say something more constructive but I'm giggling too much at the absurdity of this statement.

Probably as soon as they started trying to sell you shit.

I's not absurd at all - it's only absurd if you're in the demo that finds it absurd. And that's quite a small demo compared to most of the population.

You can't sell most people shit unless you create an emotional response.

Hacking psychology - for good or ill - is the basis of all UI and UX. It's a completely different problem to hacking code.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#46

Post by ourmandave » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #17

Funny that this article should appear: I have been complaining about the Campaign Living website for a while: http://www.campaignliving.com/ . The Campaign Living product concept is very interesting—furniture that's actually comfortable but that can also be taken apart. But there is no nav bar and few details about the product on their site. It's very annoying. Their desktop browser experience feels broken. All this…

I had to wait for, I think, a bunch of images to load and then scroll forever before I got to their products.

Scrolling made the animations run. I didn't see a skip button so I probably get to enjoy those no matter what every time I visit.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#47

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

Domenic_S wrote: post #24

gnaritas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.

The usability of what? Not a glib question -- if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out, why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar? For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases…

Well, if the entire point of your site is to let people get started, ok, remove all navigation.

But if it's useful for something else, like if there's an actual product in it somewhere, with actual features, or if there's actual content somewhere you'd want your visitors to read, it's good to give them the option of doing anything besides "getting started".

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#48

Post by jrapdx3 » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #17

Funny that this article should appear: I have been complaining about the Campaign Living website for a while: http://www.campaignliving.com/ . The Campaign Living product concept is very interesting—furniture that's actually comfortable but that can also be taken apart. But there is no nav bar and few details about the product on their site. It's very annoying. Their desktop browser experience feels broken. All this…

With your intro, I just had to see it. I don't know how interesting their products are, impossible to tell since there's no actual information to find.

Actually it's worse than nothing because it seems to promise something with the teaser arrow, but that goes nowhere. Going for the "Reserve Now" button is unlikely, after all, what am I reserving? Leaves the impression they have nothing to offer.

I really dislike nav bars that take up space on the screen, making it more annoying to read the article or get the info I'm seeking. (Though Firefox "reader" mode can help.) The opposite, no links at all, is certainly worse.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#49

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #43

wlesieutre wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let me push Alt just in case a secret UI shows up" is up there with XKCD's famous "change the screen resolution" troubleshooting strip [1]. It should not be a thing. But here we are. And unfortunately, while the "change the screen resolution" is becoming less common, burying features in undiscoverable places is getting worse and worse. What I hate the most about this is that (unlike aforementioned off-screen dialog…

In a funny coincidence, just a few minutes ago I got an email indicating that an off-screen dialog bug I reported on Windows 8 almost three years ago has been fixed. (Actually I think it was fixed early last year in a Windows Technical Preview build - two years after I reported it!) I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match: +-----…

Knowing about Alt+Spacebar has been invaluable.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#50

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #38

While this site is unusual for what it represents, I have always found it lucid to the highest degree: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

The only thing I can really complain about with BerkshireHathaway.com is that the unvisited link colour is purple, which is usually used for visited links.