Mikes Notes
Navigation hierarchies are one of the challenges of creating the large documentation sets of Pipi. How deep should they go?
This is relevant to navigation in these pipiCMS publication classes.
- pipiWiki (similar to MediaWiki)
- pipiDocs (similar to javaDocs)
- pipiLearn (similar to Coursera)
I found this excellent article from NN Group in 2013, partially reproduced below.
Resources
Flat vs. Deep Website Hierarchies
By: Kathryn Whitenton
November 10, 2013
"Summary: Information can be organized in either flat or deep hierarchies; both have their advantages and pitfalls.
Virtually every website that has more than a few pages uses some structure for organizing the content. The most common (and most easily understood) structure is to categorize pages into groups, often with distinct subgroups. The end result is a hierarchy of content, a structure familiar to most of us from our interactions with organizations, families, and the natural world.
Decisions about exactly how content should be grouped can have dramatic consequences for how your site's structure works (or doesn't work) for users, but these nuances are difficult to understand at first glance. To analyze how a structure will work, we often need to create a visualization that shows a high-level view of how the different pages of a site relate to each other.
Consider these 2 structures: each represents the same amount of information, and shows a perfectly logical way of organizing the content for a website. Yet the end-user's experience of browsing these 2 hierarchies — even if they contain exactly the same information — will be very different.
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Representing Hierarchies in the Interface
With flat hierarchies, it's relatively easy for users to understand how any given page relates to other pages, as long as there are some visible navigation menus. But the deeper a hierarchy becomes, the more likely visitors are to become disoriented. For sites that are more than a few levels deep, breadcrumbs (which show a link for each level of the site from the homepage to the current page) can help users orient themselves and understand the site structure. Sitemaps are another useful way of helping users see the structure of a website.
Flat or Deep?
Should your website's hierarchy be flat or deep? Like most design questions, there's no single right answer, and going too far to either extreme will backfire. Flat hierarchies tend to work well if you have distinct, recognizable categories, because people don't have to click through as many levels. When users know what they want, simply get out of the way and let them find it. You can use card sorting to help decide how to structure the information in the way users think about it. Tree testing can help validate the structure by allowing users to attempt to find information in the proposed hierarchy.
But there are exceptions to every rule. In some situations, there are simply too many categories to show them all at one level. In other cases, showing specific topics too soon will just confuse your audience, and users will understand your offerings much better if you include some intermediate category pages to establish context.
Observing your users — via usability testing, analytics, and search logs — can help you understand what problems your audience needs to solve and how familiar users are with your content. This background knowledge is essential to achieving the right balance between a breadth and depth in your hierarchy."- NNGroup
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