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Click and Hope Navigation

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on September 16th, 2005.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

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My recent browsing of the Internet has seen me get rather frustrated. An old design ‘mistake’ where offering navigational elements which don’t give a clue of where the link leads seems to be cropping up in the mainstream again. I’m talking of navigation where the user has to remember where links are or simply take a guess. Good examples are Britney and Chipotle.

Britney Spears Official Site navigation

Most websites using the Click and Hope technique are built in Flash. I don’t know why this is a common occurrence – maybe Flash designers tend to prefer an experimental approach?

The argument for using this navigation style is that it encourages exploration and thus makes the user ‘play with your site more.’ This may be valid but surely the content is hard to find in the first place and secondly one has to remember where it all was. So users may well use your site for longer but eventually they will become frustrated.

I hope I don’t see this techniques used by the big designers as this may encourage others to follow.

( 6 so far )

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I don’t think we’ll see this being used by any of the ‘big’ designers anytime soon. Most of them these days evangelise accessibily and useablility - and many of them hate flash.

Tom
September 17th, 2005
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I’ve also heard this type of nativation referred to as ‘mystery meat’ navigation. It used to be popular in early web days, because it was thought to foster ‘exploration’. We all know, of course, that most visitors aren’t online to explore, but rather get information as easily as possible. The only time I’ve seen this used effectively is on kids’ website, where playing and exploring is the goal of the site.

Cat
September 17th, 2005
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I agree with those comments. “Click and hope” navigation seems to be for those that like interaction, and suspense but use it in the wrong ways.

I can only see this type of navigation as being all right if it had an intelligent way of maturing itself after the user has visited it.

Lets say for example you visit a site and three circles appear with no names on the, so you click one to find it reveals the “about” page, when you see the navigation again it says “about” in the circle.

Gavin
September 17th, 2005
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[…] Now the critics out there may say “But you ranted on about this.” Well my response to that would be to inform you that this badge isn’t relied on to navigate around a site. It just provides an interesting way to get to content already available through the conventional site navigation. […]

fadtastic - a web trends journal » Blog Archive » Cutting it out
September 21st, 2005
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This kind of “Click ‘n Hope” technique reminds me of the famous article written by Vincent Flanders, called

Mystery Meat Navigation, as Cat was saying. It is also a question of usibility, maybe more than a “look and feel” perspective.

Julien Meyer
October 11th, 2005
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Julien,

Thanks for the article link. I’m glad someone else is frustrated with this navigation type.

Andrew Faulkner
October 11th, 2005
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