NDS: Segregating major users

Popular sections are inaccessible directly from large parts of the site.

The Site

NDS, a UK-based provider of digital content delivery technologies, excludes links to popular sections on many pages of its site.

NDS does not include its Careers and Investor Relations sections in primary navigation; from the home page, both are featured in a subsidiary string of links above the main navigation bar that also carries three alternative-language options and Contact Us. Within the site, this string shrinks to a single option, Contact Us. Links to Careers and Investor Relations are carried in the About and Support section menus but there are no links in the remaining four sections (Solutions, Customers, Partners, Media Center).

The main navigation bar shows blank on Careers and Investor Relations pages, leaving Home on the breadcrumb trail as the only way to retrieve the main menu.

The Takeaway

NDS has built its site on an overly silo-ed view of user activity. If every visitor arrives at the home page, has a specific task or piece of research in mind and sticks to that, then it just about works. But a lot of visitors don’t necessarily behave that way, and especially not those who are looking for a range of background information about the company.

Chief among such users are investors (potential and existing) and job candidates, who are also regularly the biggest visitor groups. Once they start moving around the site – perhaps to find out about products or look up recent news – they are most often cut off from a return to ‘their’ information. That is, if they do move around the site, the absence of primary navigation within Careers and Investor Relations being a novel form of imprisonment. Segmentation is all very well, but this kind of segregation works in no one’s favour.

First published on 01 May, 2008