Global Navigation

According to Heidi Adkisson's webdesignpractices.com Global Navigation is defined as "links to a site's top-level categories that occur on every page of the site."

Data below are from 75 leading e-commerce sites, collected in 2002 by Heidi Adkisson and in May, 2006 by KCC|NMA students. We examined the exact same sites that Heidi Adkisson studied in 2002.

Frequency of Global Navigation

  Data Comparison: 2002 2006 2007
  Percentage of sites with Global Navigation 97% 99% xx%
         

Global Navigation appears to be very popular and effective usability feature that is so common that we have found it to be a "de-facto standard" according to Jakob Nielsen's rules for identifying standards in web design as stated in his article "When Bad Design Elements Become the Standard".

Location of Global Navigation

  Data Comparison: 2002 2006 2006
  Top 89% 85% xx%
  Left 11% 13% xx%
  Main Content Area 0% 2% xx%
         

85% Top:

13% Left

Style for Global Navigation

  Data Comparison: 2002 2006 2007
  Navigation Bar 39% 38% xx%
  Navigation Tabs 43% 27% xx%
  Plain List 7% 25% xx%
  Pull Down Menu 5% 5% xx%
  Navigation Buttons 4% 5% xx%
         

As you can see in the above table, the percentage of navigation bars appears to be the same, but the number of sites using navigation tabs has declined since 2002 and in its place are sites that use a plain list for global navigation. On her web site webdesignpractices.com, Heidi Adkisson defines a plain list as "the presentation of links that did not include a different background color or rule line that visually segregated the links from the main body of the page." Please refer to her style definitions page for further clarification.

Link Treatment within the Global Navigation: Link Style

  Data Comparison: 2002 2006 2007
  HTML text (not underlined) n/a 45% xx%
  Graphic text n/a 44% xx%
  HTML text (underlined) n/a 11% xx%
         

In the above table we decided to expand upon Heidi Adkisson's study to include link treatment for global navigation links. In future studies in the years to come we hope to collect data in this category for comparison.

Link Treatment within the Global Navigation: Link Rollover Behavior

  Data Comparison: 2002 2006 2007
  None n/a 35% xx%
  Change text color n/a 24% xx%
  Change background color n/a 17% xx%
  Add underlining n/a 12% xx%
  Change graphic state n/a 12% xx%
         

In the above table we decided to expand upon Heidi Adkisson's study to include link treatment for global navigation links. In future studies in the years to come we hope to collect data in this category for comparison.