Despite the fact that there are many ways to navigate a wiki page, like most websites, users who are new to a site will often feel 'lost' and even experienced users can miss information that they need. Wikis have multiple layers of navigation to aid users in finding what they need and getting things done.
Browsing
When users browse a web site, they are relying on the Information architecture of the site to channel them to where the want to go as quickly as possible. Like the architecture of a building, the information architecture of a site effects how is looks and workds, especially for new visitors. The information architecture describes the general look and feel of a site, but in terms of navigation, it is most noticed in a few important pages such as the the home page and index pages. Most sites also have a navigation bar on the top, left or right sides that contains some navigation that is the same throughout the site.
Good information architecture is critical to a users first impression of a site and it also defines the speed by which any user can get to the information they need by browsing the site. Most users will go to the home page of a site and browse its contents to get to where they want to go, so it is very important that the information architecture is well designed.
Wikis offer a few special browsing tools that provide a great deal of help when compared with browsing a traditional web site. Some key ones are:
Recent Changes
The recent changes are generally shown on a special page that can be access from any other page. There is usually a recent changes page for the whole site, the current space and the current page. These pages can be used for:
- The recent changes for a single page can tell you a lot about the content of the page. For instance, if it has not been change for a long time, then is it out of date or irrelevant? If it has had a lot of activity, then it might be a particularly interesting page. If there there is only one author doing the changes, then how reliable is the page?
- The recent changes for a space or site can also give a lot of information. Areas that are very busy can be identified. A quick scan of recently changes pages can allow you to discover the latest information for a given area.
- If you were working on a page and what to quickly go back to it, often the fastest way to find it is through the recent changes page.
History
The history page shows your own browsing history. This can be a useful when you want to refind a page that you were looking at recently, but can't quite remember.
Breadcrumbs
The breadcrumbs are a line on links at the top left of a page. The links in the breadcrumbs show where you are in the page hierarchy and they can be a very fast way to navigate up towards the home page if you are lost in the bowels of the site.
Search
Roughly 40% of users will go straight to the search function when they go to a site and so the search is one of the most important ways for users to get to where they want to go. Users need to be familiar with the advanced search features to allow them to get the most out of the site. The advanced search features for the Confluence search engine can be seen at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF20/Searching+Syntax
Labels
Labels are single words that users can associate with any page. If users are active labellers, then a web of labels will start to grow in the site which can be used to find similar pages or concepts.
As a simple categorisation example, all pages that are associated with a particular product could be labelled with that product's name.
As a dynamic example, users might use the label 'urgent' to mark all the pages that need something done urgently. Users who are looking for urgent pages to work on, can use the labels interface to get a list of all pages that are marked with the urgent label. A user might remove a label when the task is finished.
More complex behaviour can be created by using macros (such as the {contentbylabel} macro) to generate lists and reports based on labels.
