Dynamic Page Elements-Cloak and Dagger Web Design - Current Problems
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"Three Clicks" vs. "Content Overload"
When talking to clients and designers about collapsible navigations we will sooner or later stumble over the "three clicks rule" [note 4]. This rule states that users should find any content on your page with three clicks (otherwise they get bored and fed up and leave your site to spend millions on your competitors' sites).
This rule does not state that the three clicks should happen in the same document and without a page load in between. Therefore we can satisfy it by adding a sitemap to our site, and voilà, two clicks and users can go anywhere on the page.
Of course this does not apply to a product catalogue, the three click rule needs to apply to the sub section you are in there.
Multi level foldout menus replicating a sitemap do allow the user to go anywhere on the site from any page. For a sighted user with scripting and CSS turned on this can be very convenient (granted the navigation is easy to use and does not require neurosurgeon hand-eye coordination skills), but what is shown on our screen is not everybody's experience.
By adding all the links - with all their necessary HTML - of the whole site to each page, we create a "content overload". Depending on the depth of our site, users without CSS or Javascript might see a nested list of 50 links, and will have to cope with this amount of data. Sighted users who can use a mouse might not have a problem with that, but keyboard and screen reader users will have to navigate through these links one at a time.
This can be a quite infuriating experience when you want to read link 28 and link 29 afterwards - it means hitting tab 28 times, reading, waiting for the page to load and hitting tab 29 times, repeated ad nauseam.
Some browsers have "type ahead" [note 5] functionality that jumps to a link when you type a word contained in it, and speech recognition systems can number the links for you. Regardless of these handy extensions, we still create a whole load of content that is not really relevant to this section of the site. A real world equivalent would be to print the register of a catalogue on each of its pages.
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