The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) is launching a new navigation scheme. Now I know they have decided to redevelop the site piece, and so there will always be a few rough edges, but at this stage it is hard to see where they are going with this.

Here is the old system.

The site has always presented a very flat structure, bringing sub-channels, such as Film up to the top, instead of placing it below a large category, such as Culture. The plus side was that there were fewer clicks for the user to get to the content. It was just more direct. The user also did not have solve the problem inherent in any classification system, ‘where did they put that thing?’ The downside was the sheer number of items in the primary navigation - 26. A user would not be able to automatically recognize the shapes of the words, due to the scale and sheer number, meaning they would have to read each of them in turn. This increased the amount of time they spent trying to find what they were interested in, but also meant it was difficult for a new user to grasp at a glance what the site contained. Such a system is neither scaleable nor flexible. What happens when you have more content and more channels? It would have been interesting to see how the traffic stacked up, or didn’t.So why change it? I would imagine for the very reasons I have mentioned, scaleability and flexibility.So here’s the new system.

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