The bold interface changes made to Office 2007, once you get used to it, is actually much better than its predecessors especially because of its incredible attention to mouseless navigation. However, after a conversation I had with a friend during the week I realised that the changes are still frustrating for someone that only uses the software occasionally and has the old Office navigation drilled into their subconscious.

Luckily there’s a free and easy plugin for that.

UBitMenu is a free plugin that literally brings back the classic menu and toolbars to Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Once installed you’ll notice an addition to the Office ribbon, called “Menu”, which you will find nestled between “Home” and “Insert”. Clicking “Menu” will bring you most of the old 2003 menu options arranged just the way you remember them. It’s free for home use and only €10 for commercial use. The plugin will even work in Office 2010, which hasn’t deviated much from the Office 2007 interface design.

If you want to add even more options to Microsoft Office, why not try the OfficeTab plugin – which enables you to navigate multiple open documents the same way you would webpages in Firefox or IE7. Very nifty.

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.

To help answer the question I’ve created a short 5 question survey, which I’d be delighted if you would fill out. I’ll keep it open for a week and post the results here and provided some commentary. If you have anything you’d like to add on the topic of blog navigation and design, please add your comments here.

The first few blog posts came faster than I expected and even included photos of the girls. Though she has always been slightly more technical than most, she did manage to bork the blog as soon as I took my eye of it. For some reason she went and turned all of her blog posts into pages, in the process breaking the theme she was using, as it could only handle 3 short page names/links in the navigation.

The next time I visited I offered to show her how to fix the blog (let’s just say she’s still in the process of fixing it). I asked her about changing the posts to pages and she explained “My blog posts we’re appearing in the menu” and when I explained to her about the linear nature of blogging she asked “How would anyone know that my other blog posts were there?” It was then my task to explain how categories and tagging worked, but this surprised me because I knew that she was an avid blog reader and internet user.

It was then that I began truly questioning the usability of blog navigation. We assume that readers are using tags and categories as navigational tools, but what if they’re really stumbling through the content, using the awkward archives and calendar tools? Or simply reading from finish to start? If a user enters a blog via a google search can they successfully navigate back to the home page? If every blog has its own list of different categories, how do users know where to look? Is your blog taxonomy even understood?

I recently read, on the iQcontent blog, about how visually impaired users must listen to every piece of navigation on a webpage with their screen-readers. This immediately made me wonder about the persistent nature of blogrolls, how they feature on the majority of blogs and on every single page. Are they successful at getting hits for other members of your blogosphere? Or are they just social badges, worn to show off your affiliations?

Blogs make it easier for everyone to publish to the net, but does this, in turn, make navigating the web harder for everyone else? This is something that requires further investigation, especially considering that there is a shift occurring online where entire websites are being replaced by blogs. But are they in fact borking the entire web?