Usability in action
I recently split up a lot of the pages on www.DozingDogs.com - they were too long and I really don't like making people scroll and scroll and scroll.
So the demos page for example I split into four pages, and added a little menu on the right of the pages to be able to navigate between them - it was just a simple [include:demosmenu] command.
I did this just last night and I'm much happier with the pages now.
So, this morning my wife Tara is reading my blog (so that she knows what's going on, like I don't tell her anything. Pah!) and clicks through to Dozing Dogs and instantly shouts over the bank of monitors between us
"How do I get to the next page?"
"What next page?"
"On the demos page it says 'I'll show you in a moment' but then just stops."
There she was sitting at the bottom of the demos page, not knowing what to do next. Didn't see the menu, or realize that it needed clicking on, and anyway it's at the top of the screen and she was at the bottom.
So I quickly hit the Edit link on the page, scrolled to the bottom and added a "Next, read this..." link to the next page on the menu. (Yes, CMS' are wonderful, yadda, yadda)
So now you can start on demos and click all the way through to pricing using these links. Tara was much happier, and understood it.
But then she reminded me of something I knew but had tried to ignore - I need to figure out how to highlight the current page on that menu. Which is tricky since it's all just regular content stored in the database, and shared content at that. The same menu is loaded into multiple pages. I know the answer lies in sending in a parameter to the include (you can do that already) but I'm not quite sure of the details yet. But if Tara mentions it you know everybody else is thinking it.
I wonder how long it will be before she reads this?