Blog Navigation Survey Results
I posted my initial thoughts about blog navigation here and from it came a survey that asked some simple questions such as “On a scale of 1 to 5 how easy do you think navigating a blog is?”. In total there were 47 respondents, directed to the survey via my blog, Twitter and Facebook (the sample could be considered an experienced group of Internet users).
Obviously from the results above none of the survey respondents indicated that navigating a blog was very difficult. However I would consider the most interesting statistic from the survey that 30% think it’s neither difficult OR easy, and 9% think it’s difficult. It would have been quite easy to assume that a majority would consider navigating a blog to be very easy, which isn’t the case. It’s surprising considering the high possibility that the survey respondants were experienced users.
The other 4 question results, and comments from bloggers/readers are discussed below.
These results suggest that despite RSS feeds and RSS readers, blog readers still hold easy navigation and the visual appeal of your blog as important to them.
However, 55% of respondants indicated that it IS important that the content of a blog post is visually appealing, and 26% indicated that it was very important to them. To keep your readers coming back for more, concentrating on both the overall design AND the layout of your blog posts is important.
31% indicated a preference for webpage navigation over blog navigation. However, 42% indicated no preference to either. Good news for bloggers and web designers alike.
From the Comments…
Sarah said:
I know from experience that a lot of people find blog navigation difficult, there is an album blog I run for Live Drive called Critical Junctions that generates a certain amount of listener traffic but while listeners will comment on the album choices by text or on the shows forum, they don’t seem keen to comment on the actual blog. Meanwhile they use the forum to request albums we have already done as the blog format doesn’t allow them see that it’s already been done.
Rick said:
I always presume my posts from longer than a few weeks ago are as dead as if they had never been written.
There were quite a few comments like this that highlighted the temporal nature of blogging, which is perfect for a diary style blog, but not ideal if you want readers to read your older entries. Unless, of course, you make the navigation of your blog as important as the content. Otherwise, your posts will be “dead”, pushed into archives where it’s difficult to find. It’s often assumed that readers use categories and tags to navigate.
Lottie said:
I never use categories or tags when searching a blog unless it’s a blog I am familiar with and I am looking for a specific post. Otherwise I tend to simply read some of the latest posts.
Blogs might not be breaking the web, but how users actually interact with them could be misunderstood. It has been suggested to me that many people use search as a way to navigate a blog, but search only works if you know exactly what you’re looking for and makes the reader task orientated (leading to high bounce rates) as Frank pointed out in his blog post:
Frank said:
If your blog does not lead users to further information they are interested in, they won’t even attempt to navigate. In my experience bounce rates on blogs are very high. Most traffic will arrive at a blog through long tail google searches, scan the page and either find what they are looking for and leave, or realise it’s not what they were looking for and leave.
Steps can be taken to decrease the bounce rate on your blog, it’s worth considering that a majority of them could be navigational in nature.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Interesting data.
I think there’s a flaw in this survey though. It assumes that “blog navigation” (and “web page navigation” for that matter) are universals - ie, that all blogs have the same navigation, or that all web pages do. They do not. This is why massive amounts of time, money and data crunching go into UI design and user testing.
Some blogs are easy to navigate, and some are difficult. Even small decisions can make visitors more likely to deep drill a blog. Single column sidebars will give you a lower bounce rate, as will dropping all default nomenclature and making concious decisions about what you call things.
“More about…” makes much more sense than “Categories,” for example - Categories tells you what it is, sort of, but doesn’t tell you what you can do with it.
But still, this is good and useful data and I’ll use it, so thanks for that :)
PS: “Do as I say, not as I do.” My blog is a very pretty trainwreck. I know this. I’m gearing up for a re-design, with many of these issues in mind. Ugh.
October 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Very interesting results. There are a number of blogger aid blogs like the brilliant Bloggerbuster which address the need for a less linear, diary-like approach to blogging. There are a number of magazine style layouts which allow people to see older content and favourite content much more easily.
October 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Interesting results alright- I have actually found that since I started using a feed reader (Google Reader) that I am no longer navigating most blogs. One of the reasons is that I am blocked from so many in work (blogspot mostly) but I can see the majority of the content in the reader. I have also found the search option very good in quickly finding old content- my own included!
Thats not to say that I have ignored the heuristic approach to the blog and have tried to make it easy to navigate with relevant categories for posts, a search area and different link categories so they are easy to spot.
October 29th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Hi Sinead,
An interesting post (and some nice graphs ).
I’d agree with what Sabrina said about universals – I think that generalising on something like that can be difficult.
When answering your question on the design of blog content, I rated it higher than the other visual design questions. For me, this is more important because I read most blogs through an RSS reader. I find that properly designed (i.e. marked-up) content looks better (proper headings, lists, images, etc) in an RSS reader as it will render these in a consistent way.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
@Aidan Magazine style layouts are perfect for non linear style blogs that wish they were websites, whilst retaining the wonderful ease at which you can update/post.
@Sabrina and @Dave - I agree that there aren’t universals, but there ARE universal differences. Thanks for the feedback :)