The NextStage CRO explains that when you're guiding your customer, having the right website menu systems and structures is key.

Among the many design questions that one deals with when crafting marketing materials -- and especially websites -- is "how do I draw people's attention to the important stuff?"

We've covered items along these lines in previous columns (Design Questions and Experience as an Equation). This time, I'd like to go over some research findings as they apply to menu systems and structures.

Menus, menus everywhere, but not a clickable link

Everyone knows what a menu is and how they function, so I won't bore you with stating that a table of contents is a menu, a list of benefits is a menu, static and dynamic graphics are menus, et cetera. Anything that causes the mind to do sequential searching is a menu. It doesn't matter if it's a series of links on a website, a list of benefits on a sales sheet, a list of attributes on a tech diagram or a legend on a map. Anything that provides direction for next navigational steps is a menu system and has a structure inherent in it.

People engage in sequential searching using two common methods; sameness sorting and difference sorting. Sameness sorters can pick something out of a group by first determining commonalities among all group members then figuring out which group members are not the same as the others. Difference sorters can pick something out of a group by first determining what stands out, then figuring out if it's different enough from everything else to be of interest.

Although these two search methods often end up with the same result, they are incredibly different in action and use. People use difference sorting to isolate a threat quickly. An example would be looking for terrorists coming into airports. When used for this purpose, difference sorting sometimes gets the bad name of racial profiling, which it isn't. Difference sorting is also a powerful tool when looking for things that are out of place, such as clues during police investigations.

Sameness sorting is the way to go when you want to cluster things into groups quickly; people use it to create demographics. Demographic analysis doesn't care about the one or two anomalies in a population, only the population as a whole. Nobody really cared that Othello was a Moor because there weren't that many around, hence Moors as a group had no political or economic clout, hence there was no market, hence nobody cared that Othello was a Moor. However, when lots of Moors starting showing up, Cassio opened a restaurant featuring Moorish delicacies, Iago started a scandal sheet dedicated to Moorish debaucheries and Montano started showing up at their neighborhood festivals to win their vote.

Pattern matching

Very few people are exclusively sameness sorters or difference sorters. Most people tend to one or the other but use both to some degree because the root of sorting is what's known as pattern matching algorithms. Some excellent research on targeting, tracking items and pattern matching can be found in these issues of Science and Nature magazines.

In essence, people can find something easily if they already have an idea or image of what they want in their heads before they start their search. An example of this is car shopping. It's much easier to find the car you're looking for if you've seen it on TV, in a print ad or on a website, and it is easier still if you have a picture in your hands when you walk onto the dealer's lot. It's much easier because you're matching the pattern (the picture you're carrying either in your hand or in your head) to what's on the lot, and everybody knows what can happen when the picture in your head doesn't match the one on the lot, correct?

Expectations aren't met, satisfaction declines and sales aren't made. To keep expectations in check, to assure some decent level of satisfaction, the goal of menu systems and structures must be to match a key that can't be guaranteed to exist. Not an easy task!

But wait! It gets better! Once someone has learned some method that works for them they'll use it again and again and again. This is one of those miraculous times designers can put two and two together and come up with something far greater than four.

Creating keys to memory

The key to creating menu systems and structures that are memorable is to make use of some thing people already know and some thing you already know about them. On your part, you can do some sameness sorting and determine if your audience is primarily Tourists or Locals. On your audience's part, you can make use of the fact that they'll difference sort in a way they've already learned to do, make use of daily and have been successful with many and many a time; visual hierarchies.

Visual hierarchies are as old as human-kind itself. Top to bottom is the one most people raised in western societies know from childhood.

For example, in a column top to bottom, where do you place "A"? In a row, left to right, where do you place "A"? Different placements for different tokens are true in different cultures. If you really want to have some fun with people, ask them where "1" goes in a row, then where it goes in a column, and see if they can figure out why.

Now match the two: audience to hierarchy. Is your audience mostly tourists? The great thing about tourists is that they usually don't really know where to go but they want to see everything anyway. Structure your menu as a left to right visual hierarchy and use terms that are familiar but also leading. Terms such as "About", "About Us", "Company Profile", "Management", "Products", "Case Studies", "Whitepapers" and so on are familiar and leading enough to get people to drill down a bit to find what they're looking for.

The somewhat greater challenge is in creating locals-friendly menu structures. These tend to be top to bottom, but the visual hierarchy implied by the top to bottom structure is much more authoritative than in the left to right structure suggested for tourist-friendly sites. The same menu items ("About", et cetera) used in a top-to-bottom menu create a much higher level of expectation in the visitor's psyche. The page's top to bottom menu items tend to be information-rich and can be complex, time consuming reads-- definitely not something a tourist, who wants to see it all before the bus leaves for the next piazza, has time to do.

In both cases, however, your knowledge of your offerings plays a key-role in making use of your audience's existing knowledge, and here we go back to the concept of MIPS and a Next menu item. The techniques described in those columns can give you a very strong indication of what your audience thinks is important on your site, hence your hierarchy -- left to right or top to bottom -- is established and satisfaction is guaranteed.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truck driver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthropology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychodynamics and psychosocial modeling-- and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney, among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global. Carrabis is also founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network, as well as the inventor and developer of Evolution Technology. You can download sections of Carrabis' next book, "Reading Virtual Minds," at www.hungrypeasant.com.