Where’s Navigation Going

May 31, 2010

I hate driving. I got rid of my car at the beginning of the year and everytime I have to get in a car now, it reminds me how glad I am not to have to do it regularly. If I know where I'm going it's not so bad, but when I get away from familiar roads and have to start relying on road signs I really hate it.

On Saturday I caught the train to Reading where I met the marketeer and drove to Guildford. These are probably amongst the busiest and most complex road networks in the country and sitting in the passenger seat I started thinking about what terrible Information Architecture (IA), User Interface (UI) and, by default User Experience (UX) our road system offers.

The fact sat-nav has become so prevalent is testament to the failure of the core road signage. There's simply too much signage, combined with road layouts that aren't terribly consistent from county to county. Sometimes signage is painted direct onto the road, not always helpful because by the time you're close enough to read it, it's probably too late to change lanes if you need to. Plus it can be confusing because the message on the road might not exactly correlate with the message that was on the roadside sign.

A lot of road signs are put up for safety; speed limits, sharp corners, lanes merging, no right turn, roundabout/traffic signal ahead etc ... rather than make the roads safer, they bombard drivers (most of whom are already pretty overwhelmed) with even more information, giving us less mental capacity to actually deal with the road situation. There is already some evidence to show naked roads are safer. Stop trying to control drivers and give us some space to think, assess the road situation and adapt to it. Even removing all the safety signs still leaves a complicated mass of navigation signs.

When I sat down to write this, I had some ideas about how lessons learnt from planning website navigation would feed into improving road signage. It's a bit unrealistic to compare the road network with the internet, they are fairly different beasts. However, parallels can be drawn: they are both big and complex beasts, users expect to navigate both of them at high speed, get frustrated with hold ups or being sent in wrong directions and are used by a huge cross section of society with a huge range of goals. Ultimately though, I've come to the conclusion the way they're used isn't similar enough. If you genuinely want to navigate the UK, in a car, on your own (ie without a passenger reading directions from a Route Finder printout), you probably need to have sat-nav. It has become an integral part of driving. Considering the relative low cost of a sat-nav unit, relative to the overall cost of driving anyway - it doesn't seem that unreasonable that using satnav becomes a requirement for the complexity of the road network.

So as the internet grows and its range becomes increasingly diverse, would it ever be conceivable that a similar interactive plugin would become a requirement? I guess I'm thinking particularly of javascript here. It's already fairly ubiquitous, I can't remember the last time I built a website that didn't use a least a few jQuery plugins. Best practice continues to tell us using javascript is fine as long as the site is still usable if users don't have javascript enabled. A few years back javascript probably was a luxury layer on most websites and not having it enabled wouldn't interfere with your experience too much. The proliferation of jQuery has changed things a bit. While sites might well technically function without javascript enabled, the missing functionality is so engrained into the UX, I'd question how usable many sites really are without it (in the same way you can technically navigate your way through several South East cities without satnav - but would you really want to?).

It's quite easy to buy into the argument that websites should be accessible to users without javascript - but looking ahead, I have to question this. For one - how many users actually do have javascript disabled? Not many. I suspect less than those still using IE6 and most web developers are happy enough to be dropping support for that. You could argue that reasons for having javascript disabled are more legitimate than using a 10 year old browser, but I'm not terribly convinced. It used to be for security (reasonable at the time, but modern browsers shouldn't allow any nasty javascript violations), or to stop annoying 'javascript effects' (reasonable, but you should simply not go to these sites, rather than remove genuine functionality from other sites).

In the same way you simply expect users to be able to access your site's CSS and images - I think the internet is going down a route where it will be a reasonable expectation that javascript will be enabled. Performance is perhaps the only valid argument against javascript, and does need to be considered. But only in the same way your should be optimising your images and HTML. It's fine to use as long as it's done sensibly. HTML5 and CSS3 might remove the need for some instances where javascript is being used, but ironically many websites now use javascript to emulate HTML5 and adapt CSS3 selectors for web browsers that don't provide support.

So I increasingly feel the insistence that websites must be accessible without javascript is not going to continue for too much longer.

This article is written by John Cowen, owner of Mekonta - a small web design studio in Exeter, Devon.