Let’s have a moment of silence for tertiary navigation on the web.

The poor soul never really had a chance. What with the primary navigation soaking up all the glory and the proud secondary navigation cutting through the clutter. Just when designers and information architects really started to efficiently implement a 3rd level of navigation Google comes along with a minimalist search box and blasts it all to bits. How tragic an end for the web’s third tier.

Point →
Who wants to wade through three whole levels of navigation (or more!) when there’s a 90% chance a search’s top 10 hits the mark? It’s clutter, I’m glad to see it go.

Counter Point →
I want to wade. I miss it. Some searches suck, and as a user it’s nice to have an understandable hierarchy.

Take the mighty ‘Zon as a case study of the degradation of tiered web navigation. Just a few months ago Amazon moved away from a strip of tabbed navigation that highlighted a users’ frequently visited “stores.” There were usually around 8 tabs in total, with many of their labels running into two lines of copy.

This was well and good, I never disliked it, but I was always frustrated when there was a store I wanted to quickly navigate to that wasn’t readily available. Evidently Amazon was thinking the same way, because they drastically slashed their tabbed main nav, and added a whiz-bang DHTML pop-up window. (Click on “See All 32 Product Categories.”)

What this highlights is that the path from main navigation, to a secondary subsection, and then to a tertiary listing of products has been slashed to ribbons. Now via the prominent A9 powered search (cross-marketing bonanza), the home page can jump directly to a search, which in turn links directly to product pages. Quite a departure.

This also points out the increasing confidence Amazon has in their recommendations and other features dependent on your purchase and browsing histories as opposed to a “store” based navigation structure.

Last Gasps of the Subject Directory

Amazon is just one instance of the Googlizing of Web Navigation and the effective beginning of the end of the subject tree. I’ve always like subject indices and stepping through categories one by one, confident that whatever bucket that lay before me contained all of what I wished to uncover. That kind of categorization will always be attractive to me, and I’ll always seek it out every bit as often as I do a search box in any e-commerce application.

As far as search engines go, Yahoo, and Lycos have long dropped a subject directory from their respective homepages—and who ever bothers to go directory.google.com? Far too many clicks for this day and age I suppose. Ah well, hopefully I’ll always have dmoz.

Will subject indices and tertiary navigation be simply relegated to niche applications on the web or will they make a daring comeback as users become more accustomed to a larger variety of information management systems? Maybe in the end I should just forget about directories and tertiary navigation, and instead figure out “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Search?”