Juliette/SF

12 Apr, 2007

How not to do instructional design navigation

Posted in: education| information design

“Help” is a pretty unhelpful navigation label. What’s even less helpful is if instead of saying “help” you say “H” and then put “help” in tiny letters underneath.
unhelpful help label

Now, the instructional designer for this online course needs to explain that you need to click “H” to get to “help” which is where you’ll learn “how to use this course.”

Starting the Course
If this is the first time using this course, please click Help (”H” top-right navigation) to learn about how to use this course. If you are familiar with teh course, click the Overview topic in the drop-down menu to begin.

When you see “click Next to continue,” in the course topics, please click the Next button (”>”) in the top-right navigation bar.

There’s a lot of extra space in the design. I would change the link text to “Learn how to use this course.” I’d recommend also changing the > to “Next page.” (And then make the “back” button operable; I had to reload the large Flash file to get back to the main page.)

As a rule, if you have to parenthetically explain how to use your navigation, you should reevaluate your navigation design and labels.

2 Responses to "How not to do instructional design navigation"

1 | Hillary

April 17th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

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Don’t forget that “Home” also starts with “H”. I like a “?” for help.

2 | t.s.

April 25th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

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If this example comes from where I think it does, that page as a whole is has many, many problems…

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in PotreroI'm Juliette Melton, a San Francisco resident, user experience researcher, and infrequent blogger. This is where I share interesting examples of user experiences that I come across and where I post updates on my various projects. See linoleumjet.com for my more photo-related postings.