Directory-Style Navigations - Good or Bad?

[Oli_I]

Hi everyone,

I was hoping to get some feedback, pros, cons, etc. on the following.

Recently I have noticed an increase, particularly on public sector or page heavy website, to go with a “directory-style” navigation. Basically, this approach does away with the common navigational approaches users would expect to find at the top of the webpage and instead displays a grid of content boxes in the content area of the page, each box representing a navigation point and option.

An example of this style can be seen here - http://leeds.gov.uk/

I’ve got my own opinions on this approach but was hoping to get feedback from the community. Is this good for usability? What are the pros? What are the cons? How can this approach be improved?

Looking forward to some feedback! Thanks for your time!

[Sunnah]

Interesting approach. It looks clean but it would not be my choice. It seems there is much potential for content to be lost and not even looked at. Eye tracking should place your most important high level content menus on the top. Even as screen sizes decrease those boxes drop down to multiple screens.