SCM Microsystems: Unsettling surprise

Quick links and secondary navigation are mixed in a most confusing way.

The Site

SCM Microsystems, a Germany-based digital security company, mixes quick links and secondary navigation in a most confusing way.

SCM Microsystems has familiar-looking home page navigation. Primary links such as Company, Products, Press and Investor Relations run across the top, while another set of links, with main headings About SCM and Products, run down the left-hand side. These appear to be a set of secondary links – which would allow navigation within a section – but are not. Instead they are quick links that lead to a selection of pages in sections across the site (for example, Corporate Governance and News Releases, both under About SCM).

Within the site an identically laid-out navigation bar provides secondary navigation in the conventional way.

The Takeaway

It makes good sense to provide quick links on the home page to useful content – but why make them look like something else? While visitors who think deeply about these things may ponder why there are secondary links on the home page at all – to what exactly are they supposed to lead? – the layout is so archetypical of a secondary navigation bar that most people will just assume it is one. Clicking on any of the links leads to an inside page where the left-hand bar looks the same but has a different purpose – very confusing.

Web conventions (such as what a left-hand navigation bar looks like and does) have sunk into the subconscious of many users. It is risky to move away from them at the best of times. Mixing the conventional and unconventional on the same site is plain perverse.

First published on 03 June, 2008