Unilever : Covering its steps

Major signposts are blotted out within a section.

The Site

Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch foods, household and personal goods company, hides higher levels of section navigation from immediate view.

Unilever employs a conventionally positioned horizontal bar for primary section navigation and a left-hand menu panel for moving around within sections. Rolling the cursor over a heading in the primary bar or clicking on it reveals a sub-section menu. Selecting from the menu (for example, Introduction to Unilever in About us) opens a title page, with its left-hand panel showing the section name (About us), the sub-section and its set of content headings.

No other elements are shown. To retrieve the sub-sections menu in the left navigation users must rollover a downward pointing chevron that sits next to the section name; the chevron turns to point upward and is highlighted while the menu changes to that for the sub-sections, with the current selection indicated by a prefixed downward chevron. Alternately, users can return to the primary bar to trigger the sub-section menu without losing the lower-level navigation in the left panel.

The Takeaway

Unilever has devised a navigation system that reduces the amount of clutter with which left-hand panels can quickly fill when users drill down to secondary and tertiary levels of content. Limiting the display to the selected section is a major contribution and is unlikely to inconvenience users so long as the primary bar carries the means to switch sections. Further truncating the display by masking all but the current sub-section is a bigger gamble: because it veers so far from convention, will users be able to figure it out before frustration gets the better of them?

The key may be how quickly they pick up the role of the chevron alongside the section name in the left navigation. And that may be longer than Unilever needs it to be, because convention says that a downward-pointing chevron indicates an opened file (as used by Unilever itself to mark the selected sub-section at higher levels). Here, users must intuit the conventions of a lift control panel, down to descend a level, up to ascend.

First published on 04 February, 2010