Pemaquid Communications

A few weeks ago Pemaquid launched a new Web site for the Maine Health Access Foundation (MeHAF). MeHAF advances its mission through three strategic priorities: advancing health care reform in Maine; promoting patient and family-centered care; and strengthening Maine’s health care safety net.

The goal of our redesign project was to help give MeHAF the online tools needed to share knowledge, publicize the work of its grant recipients and strengthen its position as a thought leader on health care issues in Maine.

When MeHAF approached Pemaquid in January of this year, their Web site was not helping them advance their strategy. For several years they had been using a rigid, hard-to-use content management system that had been built using proprietary programming on an ASP.net platform. The system was balky and hard to adjust to meet changing needs. MeHAF staff had a tough time understanding how to manage the CMS, let alone how to use it to communicate quickly and effectively online.

Pemaquid responded by developing a custom version of our Pemaquid Content Manager, built atop the Django framework. We were able to quickly architect a solution that allowed MeHAF to preserve and migrate all the data from their existing site. At the same time, we were able to dramatically improve their ability to self-publish content on the site. Their page templates are much more flexible and search-engine-friendly, so over time we hope to see their search positioning (already relatively good for relevant topics) improve.

With the new Content Manager in place, MeHAF can update every page on their site – and create new ones – in a way that is easy to manage and is search-engine friendly. They can even easily control naming conventions (i.e. “mysite.com/mysection/mypage”). They can update news and events, and can update the contents of a custom library of Resources.

With a little help from graphic artist Arielle Walrath we updated the look and feel of the site to match design elements from their most recent annual report, designed by Portland agency Pennisi & Lamare.

As with all Pemaquid sites, MeHAF.org is built with bulletproof, cross-browser compatible CSS and xHTML and is structured so it’s easily accessible to folks with visual and physical impediments and who use assistive devices to browse the Web.

The solid base we’ve established also puts MeHAF in position to incorporate linkages to their nascent social networking system, and Django’s Open Source framework will allow us to build an online community for sharing health information through an onsite social network/forum, should MeHAF decide to move in that direction.

Whatever they decide to do next and however they choose to approach it online, the Pemaquid Content Manager will give them a platform that allows their site to easily grow and change along with their online communications objectives.

We’ve been looking for ways to make use of our coworking space at 28 Maple that will advance the cause of digital creatives in our fair city, and tonight, from 6 – 8pm, we’ll host our first-ever evening mixer.

The event will feature a presentation by Kevin Silver on interaction design and agile development. Silver is a UX Designer at Tyler Technologies in Falmouth, Maine and he’s on the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) board of directors.

The gathering was organized by Benjamin Ho and Susan Doran, who have reorganized the local MaineUX interaction design group as the Portland, Maine chapter of IxDA (@maineixda).

Vittles will be provided free of charge by Portland Pie – and you’ll be able to wet your whistle with beer or wine. So slowly… slowly back away from the Facebook and the Twitter and come do some real life social networking with other like-minded creative types.

About Kevin Silver

Kevin is an empathetic champion of the end user and has been involved in designing the behavior of digital products since 1995. He has worked on a diverse range of projects for the government, software companies and many nationally recognized brands providing strategic direction and interaction design goodness. As a passionate advocate for Interaction Design, Kevin led the charge in forming an IxDA local group in New Mexico and is currently on the IxDA Global Board of Directors. In his role on the IxDA Board, Kevin oversees more than 80 IxDA local groups from around the world. Currently he is UX Designer at Tyler Technologies working to deliver the next generation of financial software for local governments and municipalities.

About IxDA

The IxDA Manifesto: We believe that the human condition is increasingly challenged by poor experiences. IxDA intends to improve the human condition by advancing the discipline of Interaction Design. To do this, we foster a community of people that choose to come together to support this intention. IxDA relies on individual initiative, contribution, sharing and self-organization as the primary means for us to achieve our goals.

Rob says: I’ve been giving Jordan some required reading during her internship. Here’s a book report.

The Design of Everyday Things sounds like a subject we shouldn’t need to read a book about. Especially the people who are trying to do the designing.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (also known as The Psychology of Everyday Things) talks about how poorly some things are designed.

Have you ever had trouble figuring out how to open a door? Or do you constantly turn on the wrong light switch even though you use it every day? Do you have a coffee maker, or stereo, or alarm clock that has so many buttons you don’t even know where to start? Maybe you’ve even… had trouble finding something on a Web site?

These are all failed attempts at usability.

The kicker: People usually blame themselves when they can’t figure out how to use somehting, but when things like this happen, it’s not because you’re stupid; it’s because the device or object was poorly designed.

In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman talks about all the things about human nature that aid or detract from the ability to come up with the perfect design. Everything from the user’s “conceptual map” in their head doesn’t match the physical layout, or the designer’s conceptual map, to the subtle signals we have become used to, such as, a door with a vertical handle is to be pulled out and a door with a horizontal handle is to be pushed.

As long as designers don’t ignore what people already know, and the amount they are capable of remembering they won’t have a problem. As the book goes on he goes on to explain how new technology is making some design problems, like buttons with too many functions, obsolete. He describes the various issues with everyday designs with real examples that he has come across, making it an interesting and funny read.

To anyone who is interested in learning more about Usability and Design in a book that isn’t painful to read, like a lot of the informational books out there, pick up a copy.

All you John Smiths and Davey Joneses out there should listen up…

Bright and early tomorrow, Facebook will start allowing members to “claim their name” for their profile page – i.e. http://facebook.com/roblandry.

Right now mine is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=771569224 for example. Now who’s going to remember that?

We’ve all seen URLs like that. Here’s an MSN article on the Facebook change: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31212881/?gt1=43001.

Lovely.

Why is Facebook making this change? Usability, of course. It’s much easier to remember someone’s name than it is to remember their number. In the iPhone you dial a contact by their name, not phone number.

Why do people create Web pages with long lists of unintelligible numbers? It’s easier to program.

Whenever possible, make it easy for people to remember where when they were on your Web site. After all, the 48th state to join the union was Oklahoma, not “48″ and not “?state=oklahoma”.

If a page name is easy for people to remember, it’ll be easier for them to return, and easier to spread the word about it. You’ll see traffic and sales increase.

Recently at Pemaquid we’ve begun rolling out using tools like mod-rewrite to allow Clients who use apps like our Content Manager to have page names that are easier for them – and especially their customers – to remember.

Yesterday, as the first cases of swine flu were reported in Maine, one of our Clients, Parkview Adventist Medical Center, contacted us to put a special notice about the outbreak on their Web site, as the number of phone inquiries started to skyrocket.

We handled it by putting a “pushdown” on their home page, which linked to a page with more information on swine flu in Maine. This is a common Web design technique employed by media sites such as CNN and MaineToday.com, in which you push down the normal content/layout and insert a call out on your breaking news.

Our goals in designing our swine flu notice for Parkview were to make it:

• easily noticeable, without wrecking the layout or conveying an undue sense of alarm
• easily updatable
• accessible to visually challenged site visitors

I decided to take a tour of other hospital Web sites in Maine to see how they were handling things. Here are screenshots, taken at 4pm today, of five Maine hospital home pages:

Parkview Adventist Medical Center

Maine Medical Center

Mercy Hospital

Central Maine Medical Center

Midcoast Hospital

What I found provided what I think are teachable moments on two subjects: Web site usability and content management.

Usability

When people search Web sites for information on “swine flu”, they are scanning for text links that say, um, “swine flu”. That’s the reason we used text in the Parkview notice and made the words “swine flu” the link to the page with additional information. As of this writing, Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital use text. At Central Maine Medical Center and Midcoast Hospital, they use graphics containing text.

Text in a graphic is not the same as HTML text. A proven characteristic of human behavior, banner blindness, demonstrates that people see HTML text more quickly than text in graphics. People tend to ignore graphics, in part because they are reading/scanning and in part because graphics are commonly used to display advertisements (that are usually irrelevant to the information they seek).

It’s interesting to note that both CMMC and Midcoast used a picture of someone blowing their nose. While well-intentioned, IMHO this creates mental static because such a picture could mean “common cold”, “runny nose” or even “handkerchief” and not necessarily “swine flu”.

Granted, in this case the difference is subtle, but think about your own user experience on these sites (we’d be interested in your comments).

Takeaway: If you want someone to read something, make it text.

Content Management

The layout of each of the swine flu notices give us clues as to how each hospital manages content.

Maine Medical Center – I’m almost certain they use a dynamic CMS to post News updates to the center column of the home page. I’m guessing they may have wanted to feature a swine flu notice in the Flash “marquee” (”Maine Medical Center: Centered Around You”) – and they may still do this, but the Flash is probably not part of the site’s CMS, is probably not easily updateable (and incidentally would not likely be accessible to the visually challenged).

Mercy Hospital - Again, I’m almost certain they use a CMS to update the “What’s Happening” section in the center column of the home page. I’m also fairly sure this CMS limits how prominently staff can display special notices. “Swine Flu” heading has the same color and visual weight as other sub headings in this section.

Central Maine Medical Center and Midcoast Hospital – both very likely use either a staff Web designer or contractor to create banner graphics as needed.

As we’ve mentioned, for Parkview our staff manually creates HTML pushdowns for special notices like this. At some point – for Parkview and for other Clients – it would be nice to add this feature to our custom CMS, the Pemaquid Content Manager. In the meantime, our manual updates are quick and inexpensive.

Takeaway – Content Management Systems should not impede your ability to make appropriate layout decisions. CMS’s do only what they are designed to do. If they are not designed to effectively communicate things like special notices, make sure you have access to a Web designer who can get the job done (that statement is not a back-handed criticism of the designers at other hospitals).

What do you think?

We’ve recently moved into new office space in the Old Port and while we were getting situated we borrowed the chairs of the out-going tenant, an ad agency that was dissolving.

The chairs looked great – they were super-swanky-snazzy. Who wouldn’t love to sit in them?

Anyone. Reason? They weren’t comfortable or functional.

We’ve since brought in our cheap seats from the local office superstore and are much happier with them.

The whole experience reminded me of something usability expert Don Norman used to say (I can’t seem to dig up the direct quote, so I’m paraphrasing, but I’ll put it in blockquotes nonetheless):

Not useful or practical? Must have won a design award.

I see it all the time with Web sites. There are many graphic artists who come up with visual concepts that don’t translate well on the Web.

Graphic design is only one component to a successful Web site. The best Web designers know this. Designers can’t allow themselves to get caught up in our super cool idea for a Web site if it’s not going to be useful to people who will visit it.

Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things is a great read for those wanting to know more about how to marry form and function elegantly.

Pemaquid has some state agency Clients who would love to partake of social media just like everybody else. The challenge is that the State of Maine has an accessibility policy that requires agencies to make sure they provide information in a way that’s accessible to the visually and physically impaired.

Enter Facebook. Facebook is loaded with Ajax-y goodness, the kind that’s hard for screen readers and other assistive devices to pick up. So, is Facebook accessible? Strictly speaking, perhaps it is. Here’s the more important question: is Facebook usable?

I posed the question to a colleague who’s been blind since birth and who has a Facebook account. His response:

Honestly, I hate the Facebook site. I hated the old one and try though I might, I don’t find the new layout much improved.

Admittedly, there now seems to exist heading navigation which is nice, but not knowing when pages update and so forth poses a real problem where accessibility is concerned.

I generally use Facebook via the mobile site which is much more accessible, but at the cost of a lot of features.

For example, there’s no way to access group discussion boards via the mobile site, certain notifications don’t show up and applications, well they can just be forgotten.

Still, for basic FB use, the mobile site is definitely the most efficient, most accessible way.

As all good Web designers know, Web sites should be set up so that if a visitor gets air dropped on any page they can easily answer three essential questions:

1. Where the @#$% am I?
2. Where can I go from here?
3. WTF can I do here?

(OK, some people won’t ask those questions in precisely the same tone… unless of course your Web site layout is 404 (”not found”).

Your Web site branding and navigation addresses the first two questions. It should be consistently placed on every single page on your site. In addition, if you have a page in your navigation called “About”, when your site visitor clicks that link they should be taken to a page entitled “About”, not “About Us” and certainly not “Our Company Mission” (I see stuff like this all the time).

That causes people to stop and think – and you don’t want them to do that, you want them to concentrate on reading stuff and buying stuff.

The last question is answered by clearly showing the content. Good Web copywriting is essential here. Use those bullet points, sub headings and “chunkify” the content (as someone I once worked with might have said).

The quicker a site visitor can answer these questions, the better the usability of your site. This is especially important when a search engine drop-ships a person deep into the nether reaches of your site, on a page that’s light years from the home page.

Remember, no amount of search engine marketing will make your site “sticky”. If your marvelous search engine marketing guru manages to bring people to your site – but it’s a Really Bad Web Site, one that’s confusing and hard to get around on – people will go away, and even a gigantic stimulus package of SEO dollars won’t be able to entice them to come back.

Conversely, a well-designed, usable, accessible Web site for a company that offers great products and great service will perform fine without a boatload of SEO.

Tonight I somehow ended up watching Merlin Mann’s presentation on his Inbox Zero email management system. It’s based on the Getting Things Done method of personal productivity.

The entire video, which has been around awhile, is great in and of itself, but the thing that I want to point out here is that, about 40 minutes in, Mann discusses the various GTD apps out and about and says the ones that don’t work so well are the ones that try to do too much and are loaded with features.

Once again – simple elegance FTW.

There are a ton of content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix). So how do you decide which one is right for you?

In selecting a content management system – or CMS – for your Web site, it’s important to remember that you don’t want to compromise the user experience or the accessibility of your site just so you can slap another page up there.

You also don’t want to become a slave to your CMS; it should work for you, not the other way round. It shouldn’t unduly compromise your ability to organize content on your site.

Some of the most popular systems include: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine and Silver Stripe (all of these are open source; Silver Stripe was used to create the Democratic National Convention Web site).

At Pemaquid we’ve worked with dozens of these content management systems. Usually, however, we stick with the one we’ve developed ourselves: the Pemaquid Content Manager. The basic package can be installed quickly and inexpensively, but it’s easily customizable.

Are we proud of our little CMS? Yes. Is it the right solution for all situations? No.

Over the next few weeks we’ll take an in-depth look under the hood of some of the most popular content management systems and examine the pros and cons of using them.

It’s easy to fall back on the word “user’ to describe who visits your Web site. But that makes it sounds like they’re junkies, or zombies, and it’s so… impersonal.

It’s hard to avoid the term “user”, I’ll admit. In the Web world we bandy about phrases like “user experience”, “user interface” and of course “username”. And I’ll also admit I user those terms.

Still, I think designers should employ the term only sparingly in their discussions about an interface, because I believe it puts you in the wrong frame of mind if your goal is to design easy-to-use Web sites. The folks who come to your site aren’t “users”, automatons or widgets – they’re human beings.

They’re people, people! They are Jane, Jen, Sarah and Jeff, Brynn, Jamie, Ben and Wendy. If we think a little bit more clearly about who is using a Web site, we’ll be able think more clearly about what they need to do on that site, and that will help us in turn think more clearly about how to create a great online experience for them.

Even if you’re operating on a shoestring, it pays to do some usability testing to gauge the performance of your Web site. Here are some simple things you can do without hiring a pricey consultant:

1. Get some greenhorns. Recruit people who have never seen your site before. These people haven’t “learned” your site.
2. Give ‘em a mission. Sit ‘em down at a computer and give them a specific set of tasks to perform (buy a widget, find the map, browse the gallery…)
3. Talk it out. Have them talk out loud while navigating the site so you can hear what they are thinking.
4. Must. Not. Lead. It’ll be hard, but resist the urge to assist or offer clues (now that you’ve got them talking out loud, they’ll ask questions).
5. Fine tune. Make adjustments to your site based on the feedback.
6. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You may also want to video tape the sessions to easily record commentary and movement through your site.

Friday’s ice storm proved to be an interesting case study in how folks are using Twitter to get the word out (or not).

I was awakened that day by my iPhone, which received this tweet from the State of Maine’s Twitter account @ http://twitter.com/www_maine_gov. I follow it for this very reason – to get citizen alerts on emergency conditions (kinda like the “Emergency Tweetcast Network”).

I haven’t been keeping track, but it seems like their follow count has increased quite a bit over the weekend.

I also follow @WCSH6 and @PressHerald on Twitter, and it was interesting to see how these conventional media outlets used the service. In terms of providing news-you-can-use, IMHO the results were not great, though @PressHerald came through at times.

Here are some example tweets from conventional media over the weekend:

Good:

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1053143263

Yes, OK, fair warning. I’ll be careful out there.

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1053778059

I feel bad for them; at least I know it’s a bad idea to run my generator in the basement.

Bad:

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1055263330

Yes, lots o’ folks are w/o power. But that doesn’t help me much. Tell me where the downed power lines are, the large traffic accidents, what local authorities are saying to people in their respective communities about ETA of electricity.

http://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/1053509213

I could’ve guessed that. But I’m in my car on my mobile device – where are those roads?

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1053582227

Street flooding? Where?!?

http://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/1052326387

Really?!? Drivers are sliding around? How about telling me where those roads/accidents are so I can avoid them?

http://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/1053359047

No shit, Sherlock!

If you’re going to tweet, please make it useful. If your mission is to provide information to the public, make sure that tweet contains actual information. Please don’t tweet and say, in essence, “go to my Web site for complete coverage”. A lot of folks had mobile devices that worked (the AT&T network was rock solid for me and my iPhone) but could not get to the ‘Net (my tweet peeps and I were hard pressed to find it all day Friday – I hear Portland coffee shops were crowded).

So, to news outlets: Don’t try to drive me to your Web site b/c your advertisers need pageviews for your banner ads. Gimme some news on the spot! If you don’t, I’ll gravitate towards others who will fulfill that need.

Just read an article today on how people go about finding the best deals on travel sites. One self-proclaimed road warrior says he starts with Orbitz.com, because he “likes the layout”. He’ll move on to Expedia or Travelocity if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, but its interesting to note that he starts on a particular site because of how it looks and how the information is presented.

All things being equal, good design is a key differentiator that will help your site stand out from the crowd. It shouldn’t be given short shrift.

I second the emotion in Jeffery Zeldman’s latest post – on usability and info architecture as part of the Web site development process. That is, they need to be key ingredients, not “extras” or afterthoughts.

I also am in total agreement on how design fits into that process. Graphic design’s primary goal is not to bowl people over with pretty graphics, it’s to elegantly honor the content and assist the user in finding his/her way around a site.

Technological solutions need to be simple – drop-dead simple – to be successful. If we want to make our apps accessibile to everybody, then we need to eliminate the learning curve.

Let’s pick on content management systems. There’s Drupal, Expression Engine, SilverStripe, Django, TextPattern… the list goes on and on.

They are all great tools for managing content. On the other hand, you need to have a bit of savvy to use them. Take Drupal, for example. It’s a powerful and flexible framework, but I wouldn’t turn it over to the marketing guy and walk away (I know, I used to be the Marketing Guy).

For decent interaction design for Everyman we can look to social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are easy to use. In the case of Twitter, there is a very simple core feature set that’s fine for most folks, but just below the surface there are a ton of other goodies that experts can put to use when tweeting. That’s the hallmark of a killer app.

So when creating successful interaction design, start with simple – and keep it that way.

Today turned out to be an interesting study in usability, the power of Habit, and backwards compatibility. A colleague – she’s an über-geek – casually asked if I was running Firefox 3, the latest (beta) version of the popular open source browser put out by the Mozilla Project and released into the wild last Tuesday. Nope, I said, but I can fix that soon enough (it sounded like something worth doing). I downloaded it.

Alas! My productivity took a detour.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to knock FF3, and it’s got lots of worthy improvements, especially in the area of security. It easily updated my bookmarks and reconfigured my plug-ins. New plug-ins were easier to install and pop ups were easier to deal with. But, as they say, it is the little things that count.

For me, that was things like the browser chrome. Whoever designed FF3 must have loved Netscape 6+ and Safari, because the chrome looks very similar to those browsers. Not a big deal, but it was a “little” detail. It took a split-second longer for me to find my bookmarks and links in the chrome (which were not _quite_ where they used to be), and all those microseconds added up to a usability issue. It reminded me of a basic tenet of usability – Don’t Make Me Think!.

In other words, the more a person has to think about how to complete a task, the less they are thinking about the task itself – and that makes it tough to concentrate. Apps that make you think will ultimately be less successful than those that don’t.

I could have lived w/that. But the clincher for me was the download error I got when I tried to install Firebug 1.1 (the version that is supposed to run on FF3). That did it – I need my Firebug! Back to Firefox 2 – at least for now.

Editor’s Note: Eureka! I found Firebug 1.2, which does in fact work on FF3. So… with that, I can bounce back up to version 3.

Before launching a new site, it’s always a good idea to run a check on its accessibility to folks with visual or other physical disabilities.

One of our favorite tools for checking Web site accessibility is no longer available. The WebXact service from Watchfire had a very comprehensive free assessment tool that not only checked accessibility but also other important components of the Web page to make sure it was well-formed. Alas! IBM, which owns Watchfire, decided in February that the tool would no longer be offered for free – it now costs a very steep $1,580 for a 12-month license.

Not surprisingly, according to one metric I use, the site’s traffic plummeted in March to half of its previous levels. I expect April’s traffic numbers will be down even further. Perhaps a better idea would have been for IBM to continue offering WebXact for free while posting ads for content relevant to those using the service.

No matter. Other excellent free tools are available. Here are a few we use at Pemaquid:

• Cynthia Says Portal (contentquality.com) - from HiSoftware, a company that develops accessible software. Just enter the URL of a page in question on your site, and the service will run a report to show how it measures up against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 guidelines. The report is thorough and runs very fast. It’s become the spot-checker-of-choice for many top-flight Web design firms.
• WAVE – runs a similar report when you enter the URL of a page. Offers a visual view of the page as well as some other features, including a text-only view. Not as comprehensive as Cynthia Says. Here’s a report on Pemaquid’s home page

No accessibility tool is perfect, but these two can help you avoid making obvious mistakes.

Finally, I should add Web designers shouldn’t rely on any tool to tell them whether their work is accessible. You need to do your homework. Required reading: the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines for accessible Web design.

Seems like everybody is Twittering these days (or at least everyone in the wonderful world of Web).

For the uninitiated (unindoctrinatred?) Twitter is a service that let’s you tell your buds where you are and what you’re doing in up-to-the-minute detail (emphasis on “minute” as in ‘my-NOOT’). You can post to your Twitter via a cellphone text message and your pals subscribe to be notified when you “twitter” (verb). You can “follow” the tweets of others, having the site alert you by cellphone when friends update their accounts.

It’s this “text-message-broadcasting” that makes Twitter unique.

I’d always been of the opinion that all this twittering is not especially useful, and that instead of making life easier it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. I recently had the perfect opportunity to test that assumption: the 2008 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I knew some folks who were going to attend and Twitter seemed like the perfect way to stay in immediate contact as we fanned out across the cavernous conference facilities.

At that it worked reasonably well. “Panel in Ballroom A rocks! – u should b here” or “I’m coming down from the second floor – meet me at the 4th Street entrance and we’ll go to lunch” were typical posts. On the other hand, I concluded that I could have easily survived – as I have for many years – without the tweeting.

There’s a certain tyranny about using Twitter. Ostensibly, one of the biggest reasons to use Twitter is to let your pals know where you are or what you’re thinking in up-to-the-minute fashion. So you can easily fall into a post-early-post-often-vortex in order to keep friends informed (otherwise, after all, they might think you’re dead, and come to look for you at your last-twittered location).

Many technological tools are like this. There’s a tantalizing enticement to do something you’ve never been able to do before (”Cool, I can send a single text message to a Web site and it can alert all my friends? Dude!”). We spend a lot of time in front of our computers… because we can (I’m guilty as charged). We use devices that save us time – but if we then fill up that newly-found free time with activities that aren’t very meaningful, our quality of life goes down, not up.

There’s a usability message here: before adopting a new technological device or app we should take a serious look at whether these tools truly help make our lives easier and better – or merely different.

I surfed over to a certain Maine Web site the other day and found that it had been redesigned. Here is the site navigational structure:

Can anyone tell me with 100% certainty what those items represent?

Therein lies the problem. You can’t tell what you’re going to get when you click (you can’t even tell that you can click). The only hint that this is the site navigation is that it is positioned in the spot where, if you’ve surfed for any length of time, you know that navigation is usually found.

Here’s the site, btw, if you’d now like to see that nav positioned within the overall layout.

(I don’t mean to pick on Downeast. They’re a great company and their Web site is far better than the previous version. I’m just using their site to show how you can improve the user experience on sites you design.)

Navigation is best as text. Text that is unambiguous. “About” is more effective than “Who We Are“.

Lo and behold, when you mouseover the nav on this site in question, you see a… word.

There are two big reasons why you should use text in you site navigation.

Usability. There’s an excellent book on Web design by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think. In it, Krug points out usability studies show that people usually don’t read Web sites – until they’ve found that article they were searching for – they scan them. Navigational text that is simple and clear supports this scanning activity. With graphics, you have to stop and think (”hmmm… what could a camera mean?…”) This is why icons, unless they are universally understood, are also poor choices for navigational labels on Web sites.

Accessibility. In the example above, if you were visually impaired and came upon this site, there would be no way for you to understand that the images represented the site navigation. It would be much better to place navigational items towards the top of your HTML as a list of text links and to then use CSS to style the list to match your overall design concept.

Web site designs like the one in question point to a larger issue in Web design, which I call The Tyranny of Graphic Design. That’s a topic for another day, but briefly, Web design is not graphic design. It’s interaction design (of which graphic design is certainly a part). In creating Web sites, designers should take care that the graphical design concepts they produce make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on a site, not harder.

Don’t make me think…