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Standout UI: Yahoo Foods
Last week Yahoo launched their new food site, and with it a whole slew of nice UI innovations. My favorite new thing is the navigation tabs. Here are two screenshots: the first is the Yahoo Foods homepage, with your normal tab layout. The second shot is from the site's subsections where the tabs are hidden behind the "Food Home" widget.
Very slick! I am becoming increasingly convinced (thanks mostly to the persuasiveness of a coworker) that most of the time global navigations are a waste of valuable screen real estate and don't serve much purpose. The Yahoo Foods solution is the best compromise I've seen so far between hiding the global navigation and keeping the ability to easily switch sections.
Technorati Tags: UX web design yahoo yahoo food webdev user experience
Nice catch. Yahoo's solution for handling their main nav is pretty cool. Seems so simple but I've never seen it like that. Thanks for sharing.
Comment by writerbd — November 10, 2006 @ 6:13 pmWhat's the argument for not having a global navigation and do you mean web sites or web apps?
Comment by Kurt — November 10, 2006 @ 9:10 pmSay you are on Yahoo Foods looking at recipes for lasagna. You are likely to jump around that section a fair bit, finding related recipes or information about ingredients or dishes that go well with lasagna. You are not very likely to hop into the "Special days" section while browsing a recipe. The space used by the global nav could be better utilized with contextually relevant navigation depending on what section you were in.
While I think this applies both to traditional web sites and web apps, it is less of an issue with applications because the truth is that global navigation in most sites is driven as much by marketing as it is by user experience. With most web sites, a global menu serves as much of a role in advertising the features of the site as it does providing actual navigation. That's how you end up with navigation like this (not real of course). Amazon's current system works similarly to the Yahoo Foods one by hiding all the stores behind a "See all 35 Product Categories" tab.
Really though it all comes down to context. If your user is likely to want to jump from a recipe for turkey to a Thanksgiving Planner (which is under the "Special Days" section), it is better to have that contextually called out on the recipe page rather than relying on them to figure out that there might be something they want to see under a different tab.
Comment by Mark Allen — November 12, 2006 @ 12:39 pm