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The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

uxmovement.com

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

#71

Post by mjevans »

TylerE wrote: post #63
frik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially annoying if you log-in on a SaaS service to find out their redesign makes things worse. Actions that took one click, now take three clicks. As they seperated their single products into different products, removing navigation elements, introducing long animations, don't update their CSS for mobile devices, etc.

Does a redesign ever make things better?

I can't think of any that come to mind. I've seen a lot that just do something different... but when I think of 'web 2.0' I think of re-designs that make things 'more beautiful' (pretty) but at the cost of actual functionality. Of course I recognize that many think differently than I do; it's possible that previously they had been given too many choices and thus couldn't understand the system.

As for re-designs, I think that it depends on the basis for decisions and effort spent in the re-design.

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

#72

Post by WorldMaker »

vitd wrote: post #67
WorldMaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An existing user logging in is such a boring metric compared to a new user signing up.~

Well you can shoot yourself in the foot with that thinking. I have a friend who told me she has something like 20 Stack Overflow logins because she can't remember the passwords to any of them so she just keeps creating new ones. I wonder how many other sites run into this issue? Are they signing up as many new users as they think?

Right, hence the sarcasm mark in my post. I think it's a weird tendency for people to care more about their overall user count as some success indicator and focus their UX so much on onboarding new users to seeming disinterested in existing users. Things like "User Satisfaction" and "are my users happy with my product" are a lot harder metrics to get right and I think that's part of why they get discounted by investors/shareholders over raw growth numbers which can have a big, easy "wow" factor in a presentation graph...

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

#73

Post by NoGravitas »

panglott wrote: post #28
ashark wrote: post #12

Relatedly, I noticed the other day that I'm developing a flick-down reflex in response to seeing those stupid "hero" header images/videos appear on page. It's becoming an unconscious action. These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation. I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin t…

Yea, as soon as I see a big image header I reflexively start scrolling through the article looking for some actual information. I blame Google/Android for all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality.

I reach for the 'reader' button in Firefox to convert the page to newspaper-style.
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