Back to the top: navigation and design failure.
One of my pet peeves that I consistently see with businesses who traditionally relied on the sunday advertisement insert is a reluctance (or perhaps overt refusal) to format their weekly ad in a manner more appropriate for the web.
Case in point: I was looking for a new backup hard drive today, and after becoming frustrated with the lack of usability on the ShopLocal.com, I reverted to switching back to viewing the weekly ads of individual retailers, where I happened to stumble across this perfect example – a weekly ad from Best Buy.
We’ll leave aside the fact that this opened in a pop-up, cosmetic issues and the use of flash for the time being…. What’s key here is that the majority of advertisement content that is of interest to the consumer is below the fold, requiring that the user scrolls down the page to see the content that is of interest to them. And if you look at the next image, you’ll see why.
The layout of the ad is intended to reflects the dimensions of a page in those the traditional weekly newspaper advertisments… the ones that were so unwieldy, where you had to either clear a 3′x5′ space to read on, or make a real effort to keep the paper from flopping over on itself… the ones that have been largely replaced in print by a more manageable tabloid format.
Perhaps the old-style ad layout was selected by the designer to reinforce metaphor of a print ad by as a way to make users comfortable with the notion of viewing an ad online. Or perhaps they are simply unwilling to put their ads in a more usable format in order to force more user interaction with their content in hopes of increasing conversions.
Regardless, this format, utilized by grocery stores and other big-box retailers on their sites might be palatable, were it not for one key problem that always appears to be found in near proximity:
You read through the page, only to see that it’s nothing which interests you in the least, you go to view the next page, and …. wait…. where? … WTF… ah… what a piece of crap… you discover the greatest foul of all: there is no navigation at the bottom of the page, so you need to perform another action to return to the top of the page, and yet another to see the next page of the ad.
Sure, it might not sound like a big deal, but when you’re looking for a specific item on circulars from 10 different sites, initially it creates uncertainty by going against the user’s expectations; it becomes tedious, and it diminishes any good will a customer has towards the retailer.
Most important: always include navigation elements at both the top and bottom for any page that may have content dropping beneath the fold.
There really is no excuse for not doing this… and no, using flash is not an excuse.
Take advantage of the space you have.
Rather than designing for print and posting the layout directly on the web, designers should design their blocks of content in a modular fashion that supports multiple layouts. The ideas I have for cross-design are another post altogether, but for the time being, suffice to say that with the proliferation of cross-publishing tools, such as indesign, there really is no longer an excuse to design for one medium at the exclusion of the rest. And again, no, using flash is not an excuse.
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