On Sun, 23 Mar 2014, Randy Bush wrote:
small screens are a good point, in many cultures phones etc. are the
main mode of internet access. not sure what a clean, modern look and
feel is, but that may just be my age showing. what about the trade-off
between density and having to do more clickivation to get where you want
to go? i am on the dense side, probably because i have become used to
japan's high visual density, and i kinda hate lots of clicking and page
loading.
Careful organization can generally achieve a good balance between
density tree depth. Small screens, in particular as found on phone
devices, suffer because click resolution is limited by the size of
a finger tip.
Another enemy of usability is frequent reorganization of commonly
used pages. If one must always look for commonly used links
because they move around, efficiency suffers. In my observation,
attempting to achieve high density results in more frequent
adjustments.
Backward navigation is critical. If you make the wrong choice,
perhaps because your finger didn't touch the correct place
on the screen, going back must be easy. This can be achieved
by taking care to insure that the browser back button will
always work, OR always having a reverse navigation element
on every page.