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.

I think the primary navigation at the top is successful. There are still too many categories, but a newspaper site doesn’t have much choice. The colour, the scale, and the serif font make the most of it. Coding Blogs, Jobs, and A to Z in black is also useful information, eg these parts are different than the other parts. The sub-navigation or secondary navigation (the second line) is not so successful. The grey bar is clunky, and competes with the first line instead of complementing it. The red-orange highlight on News seems odd - shouldn’t News be on the primary navigation be highlighted instead? Since it runs across the page, instead more conventionally down the left-hand side, the Guardian is limited in how many items they can include and consequently the width of the site structure, eg it will have to go deeper.It is too early to see how the system will roll-out across the rest of the site. If we go back to the example of Film it not has to be accessed via the Culture channel.

But the logic is not followed through, yet, eg. Film does not appear on the sub-navigation.It is interesting to contrast this with how the Telegraph deals with this problem. First I have to confess I did some work on this site for the Telegraph back when I worked for Interesource.Their old system was very confusing. We did a short usability project and made some recommendations on structuring the site, and how it should be represented in the primary and sub-navigation. This is the result and I think I recall that traffic went up %10.The primary navigation is broken into two pieces, one running across the top, the key channels, and the other running down the left-hand column. They distinguished the different areas, channels from content types such as blogs, by space alone.

I’m not saying the telegraph is better, it is just interesting to see how they dealt with the same problem.In my work I deal less and less with channels - the subject of my next blog post - but the information design problems are still the same.