Tags: ask

Gerry talks about “top tasks” a lot. He literally wrote the book on it:

Top tasks are what matter most to your customers.

Seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s actually pretty rare to see top tasks presented any differently than other options.

Look at the global navigation on most websites. Typically all the options are given equal prominence. Even the semantics under the hood often reflect this egalitarian ideal, with each list in an unordered list. All the navigation options are equal, but I bet that the reality for most websites is that some navigation options are more equal than others.

I’ve been guilty of this on The Session. The site-wide navigation shows a number of options: tunes, events, discussions, etc. Each one is given equal prominence, but I can tell you without even looking at my server logs that 90% of the traffic goes to the tunes section—that’s the beating heart of The Session. That’s why the home page has a search form that defaults to searching for tunes.

I wanted the navigation to reflect the reality of what people are coming to the site for. I decided to make the link to the tunes section more prominent by bumping up the font size a bit.

I was worried about how weird this might look; we’re so used to seeing all navigation items presented equally. But I think it worked out okay (though it might take a bit of getting used to if you’re accustomed to the previous styling). It helps that “tunes” is a nice short word, so bumping up the font size on that word doesn’t jostle everything else around.

I think this adjustment is working well for this situation where there’s one very clear tippy-top task. I wouldn’t want to apply it across the board, making every item in the navigation proportionally bigger or smaller depending on how often it’s used. That would end up looking like a ransom note.

But giving one single item prominence like this tweaks the visual hierarchy just enough to favour the option that’s most likely to be what a visitor wants.

That last bit is crucial. The visual adjustment reflects what visitors want, not what I want. You could adjust the size of a navigation option that you want to drive traffic to, but in the long run, all you’re going to do is train people to trust your design less.

You don’t get to decide what your top task is. The visitors to your website do. Trying to foist an arbitrary option on them would be the tail wagging the dog.

Anway, I’m feeling a lot better about the site-wide navigation on The Session now that it reflects reality a little bit more. Heck, I may even bump that font size up a little more.

This is the second briefest visit I’ve ever paid to Seattle. I arrived last night and I’ll be leaving in just a couple of hours to head for home.

The briefest visit I’ve ever paid to Seattle was just over a week ago. That lasted just long enough for me to grab a few hour’s sleep in a hotel near the airport — in room 404, no less — before heading north to Anchorage, Alaska.

In the following week I saw plenty of sights. I certainly had no lack of daylight in which to see them. With just a few weeks to go until the Summer solstice, night time doesn’t last very long.

I spent three days on The Spirit of Columbia cruising around the glaciers of Prince William Sound and the rest of the time was divided between Anchorage, Talkeetna and Denali National Park.

The three-day cruise offered up plenty of wildlife sightings: one bear, a drove of mountain goats, a bevy of otters, a bob of seals, a convocation of eagles and a gam of whales. The sight of a young humpback whale lunge-feeding near the shoreline was eclipsed only by the unusual sight—to my eyes, at least—of an eagle swimming. I thought that maybe the eagle was in distress but no, apparently when an eagle catches a really big fish, it will try to swim to the shore with it rather than let the prize go.

The landscape was, needless to say, spectacular. I took plenty of pictures but the only ones that really get the scale across are the panoramas I stiched together (Photoshop CS3 makes this a breeze using File → Automate → Photomerge).

Peruse these at full size to get all the detail. I’m particularly fond of the panoramas created from pictures taken on a crisp clear day atop a glacier at Denali after an exhilarating helicopter ride.

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