- Tell customers where they are, and what product they're using
- Give them a common set of tools to help them find their way around your web site (usually a login/username link and maybe a help link and a search box to navigate the site).
- Promote other services that drive a company's business goals.
I'd like to call attention to two different companies and their approach to designing standard headers. It should tell us something about the companies and their focus and priorities.
Here's Yahoo! Groups, indicative of headers all over Yahoo.
- Yahoo! Groups logo
- Account links
- Help link
- Promo for getting Yahoo! on your phone
- Links to other popular Yahoo! products
- Big search box for searching the whole web. (Not for searching Yahoo! groups)
Here's Google Reader, indicative of headers all over Google in non-search products.
- Link to a list of popular Google products
- Google Reader logo
- Account links
- Link to settings
Which header does a better job of serving the customers of the product? How are the interests of the companies being expressed in these header designs? Which header has the right balance of these interests?
I would argue that Google's header is significantly more focused on the customer and the context. It's related to the Reader product with a search box for searching within reader. There are also a set of links promoting other products, but these don't get in the way. I wonder if Google had considered making the search box a web search box instead of focusing it on the Reader experience?
Yahoo's header is all about driving traffic to other Yahoo! services. In all the space they take up for the header, there is surprisingly little that's of use to me as a consumer of Yahoo! Groups. I wonder if Yahoo! header designers could pull the balance a bit further toward the group context without sacrificing the revenue and traffic driven by the other links?
what are your answers to these questions? :-)
ReplyDeleteYou could never change the header without changing Yahoo first. The structure of any organization is almost always reflected in the structure of its website.
ReplyDeleteYahoo is audience-driven in the sense that everyone's driven to steal every other division's audience. And you see it right there in the so-called universal header.