Intriguing Branches

Problem

People seem to have increasingly shorter attention spans, but you want to get and keep their attention.

Solution

Strategically place links to related content to attract and keep people’s attention.

Context

• You have a good reason to draw people into intriguing branches.
• You have content to branch to that is likely interesting to your target audience.
• You have the time to plan out a branching strategy and the ability to see it through.

Rationale

In the sea of information that is the Web, most sites are fighting for people’s attention. They want people to come to their sites and stay there for as long as possible. Sometimes the reasons are ideological, sometimes strictly informational and altruistic, and more often, they are commercial. Whatever the reason, a tried and true approach is to create links between content on your site.

People are naturally curious; however, they are, as a rule busy and rushed, especially when it comes to browsing the Web. They typically don’t read thorough but rather scan, so to interest them in intriguing branches, you have to think strategically about what your branches are and how to draw attention to them.

Implementation

The trickiest part of implementing this pattern is in figuring out just what is and is not intriguing to your target audience. This involves an investment in information architecture and potentially some amount of user testing. Jared Spool’s company has some good resources on “Designing for the Scent of Information.” While they’re more focused on helping people find specific items on e-commerce sites, many of the principles can be applied towards effectively creating intriguing branches.

Probably the most important aspect to consider is relatedness—how related a branch’s content is to the content at hand. People are far more likely to follow branches that are related to their current interest than something not; however, that doesn’t exclude changing their interest towards something else—you just have to work harder at other aspects.

One of those, and probably a very close second to relatedness, is visual design. You need to design your content in such a way as to draw attention to the branches that are available. This can be something as simple as colored links (since Web users are so used to them), but often you want more structured branches such as a tag cloud, list of related products, or whatever.

In this case, you need to think about the usual suspects of color, contrast, foreground/background, alignment, fonts, imagery, etc. to create a visual hierarchy that is appropriate for your content as a whole and specifically in terms of drawing the right amount of attention to your intriguing branches. For instance, you may want to use Titled Sections, Extras on Demand, or even Illustrated Choices.

Remember that these are branches, which imply a trunk—the main task/content that people had when heading down an intriguing branch, so most of the time you want to enable them to get back to that main thing fairly easily. This could be simply letting them use the Back button in their browser or the Close button on a popup window, or it could be something more explicit like a history-based breadcrumb.

Sources

Jennifer Tidwell, Intriguing Branches

Tags

Navigation, Information Architecture, Browse.