This post is more for me to allow me to really understand the issue of sorting and organizing, because several times I have to face business people wanting to “alphabetically sort” navigation elements on a website.
I always doubt that that is a good idea, because when I personally look at a website I tend to go for the things which are visible at first sight. The sorting aspect of a list comes only after visiting the website a few times when you get to know the subject and the navigation of the website. So here we go:
Sorting is ordering data: alphabetically, numerical, by day, week (by number again) and/or month.
All these sorting orders are based on random lists. By random I do not imply a mathemacical random list, but just the fact that we assigned an order to words, and because everyone knows the order, the list becomes a functional tool.
Most people do not have to think about whether a 4 comes before a 7, or that the month of January is the first of the year. The fact that we all have a complete image of these things in our mind, makes them so practical.
But does it make sense for the navigation of a website?
In a website the navigations is about information (that is not everything, I will get to that), which is something different then data.
I had a look at the dictionary entries:
Information: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence
Data: factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation
The 2 definitions tell me that data is used to generate information. Information emanates from data, it is the basis on which we can form a decision or some reasoning.
Well, if we apply this idea to the navigation of a website, we should be putting organised information on the website and that information should be coming from the data we collected as a basis to create the website.
Sounds good, but what about the visitor? People could still argue that sorting can be applied to information to ease scanning of the list, to guide the visitor of the website.
Guidance
The argument to ease scanning is actually a valid one, though not good enough, I think. People scan pages, they tend to skip most of the things available on a website. And now it comes down to what you want as a webmaster, do you want people to see the items that start with an A first, or do you want a visitor to see things that are important first?
I guess the answer should be clear, the important things should go on top and the order should be the order of importance. Importance, of course, can be defined in different ways ( from a user perspective or from a business pespective) but it certainly is not following the order of a very famous random list. If you want to guide the visitor, you should give them the most important bits of information first.
Translations
The reason why I came up with this subject is that I had an argument with a colleague after I noticed they had sorted the list of services by alphabet. A first, B second, etc… you know :-)
Now, the thing is that the most important service started with an A, and that the manager in charge is responsible for that product. In this rare case, the alphabetical sorting order matched the order of importance (from the business point of view).
This is an exception and will not happen very often, but lets look at this example and see what might happen in the future. The service is an international service in Europe and it has to cather for the south of europe. In my experience with international websites that try to reach the public in the south of europe, you need a translation in the local language.
Ok, you already know what is going to happen to your nicely alphabetical order, right?
Once you start creating multi language websites, you have no way of ordering a list alphabetically and keeping the order of the items in the list.
I wrote about this before, as I was faced with a sorting problem of a list in Chinese
When everything else fails
When your website navigation fails, and your visitor cannot find what he/she is looking for, an alphabetical list of keywords, a sitemap where the subelements are ordered alphabetically, and/or a monthly list of posts on a blog, are valid examples of pages where you can alphabetically sort information. But that is when everything else fails …
I am sure there are other reasons why it is bad to sort you information as you do with data on a website, but for now this is what I experienced.
Please leave a message if you had similar experience with this kind of problems.
