Now this is kind of tongue in cheek, but there is a certain amount of truth within it. I can’t take full responsibility for this article as it actually appeared a couple of months ago on seomoz.org by a gentleman called Matthew Inman.

Some of you may of heard of the phrase “A Camel is a horse designed by a committee”, this pretty much expands on this theory. More…

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When Transport for London relaunched their site last month I’ll admit I didn’t like it. It made me change the way I was used to doing things. But now that I’ve had a chance to use it and look at it more closely I’ve come to appreciate that it’s a huge improvement over the old site. They’ve put a lot of thought into usability & accessibility and they use semantic html & css throughout (albeit with a smattering of minor validation errors).

So well done. Shame the journey planner is still useless!

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As mentioned recently in the usergroup forums, the last time we tried to change the way links are displayed it caused an uproar! However one of the main recommendations of my usability report was that visited links should change colour. This is particularly important in the support section so that you know which pages you have already looked at (either so you can avoid looking at them again or so you can find them more easily if they were useful). It is less important in places such as the member centre.

Blue underlined links are certainly the easiest style to recognise but they are not necessary in all situations. As long as link presentation is consistent and links are easily differentiated from text, even on a first visit, then that’s fine. Currently, however, neither of those requirements are met.

What are your thoughts on links presentation?

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The Problem
The Help & Support page is both a section index and a section in its own right. Therefore where should it appear in the tabbed navigation?

Thanks to bradley8131 for raising this issue in the forums.

The (possible) Solution(s)

1. Don’t change anything and let users work out that they need to click on the ‘Help & Support’ tab to get back to the help index.
2. Add a ‘Help & Support’ as a section alongside ‘Service Status’, ‘Help Assistant’ and ‘My Questions’
3. Add an image link to the help pages index in the right column similar to the current link to ‘Help Assistant’
4. Create a new Help & Support section index that links off to each of the sub sections (of which the current help pages index would be a new one).

Unfortunately none of these are fully satisfactory.

The first option requires users to think too much and we all know that’s not a good idea!

The second creates two links that point to the same page and would be very confusing.

The third would take up a lot of room if it has to be present on every page.

The last option is the most logical and is consistent with the way the rest of the site is organised but unless it adds something useful then the index page just becomes an obstacle to reaching the support pages quickly. Eventually we plan to create a new help section index page that summarises your open tickets/questions and attempts to predict what you are looking for based on your viewing history… but we’re not there yet.

So over to you. What do you suggest?

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