Re: Websites without Hierarchical URL structure cause bad user experience?

On 15/12/13 18:15, Ganesh J. Acharya wrote:
> Do people use address bar as a means to navigate pages within a website?
> Yes they do!
>
> Most browsers maintain a visit history and guide users by providing page
> suggestions as soon as users start typing using *Auto Complete.* It
> provides inputs both from user’s visit history, and some browsers such
> as Chrome <http://google.com/chrome> also tries to guess the user’s
> search intent by suggesting various options at the address bar itself.

The way the web was originally conceived, and the reason that 
non-Microsoft web servers have index.html, is that you should be able to 
truncate a URL and still get something useful.  Unfortunately commercial 
designers very soon decided that they didn't want to have users see file 
directories, but neither wanted to create the HTML pages to substitute 
for them, so they all set their servers to reject directories with no 
index.html/default.htm, rather than letting the server fill the gap. 
Some even forced people back to the home page.

>
> But, nowadays I have noticed websites adding pages directly to the root
> folder, and then only after opening the desired URL the necessary

That's not exactly new.  It's mainly the result of database driven 
content management systems.  Page designers don't consider it a problem, 
as for the correct "user experience", the user should not be improvising 
their navigation, but following the psychologically designed links.

Received on Sunday, 15 December 2013 18:44:08 UTC