Board Thread:New Features/@comment-20644-20170522203248/@comment-27254951-20170614221203

Providing more links actually makes things more difficult for your visitors.

Too much choice is a bad thing in the user experience design world because it leads to what's known as decision paralysis. This means there's so much over-analysis of what to do that visitors find it difficult to decide what to navigate to. Once a user reaches this point, they get frustrated and leave with a bad taste in their mouth, making them unlikely to return to your wiki and instead find answers elsewhere.

So what makes a great menu navigation? How should you handle your complex wiki structure with thousands of pages? And why should you limit your navigational links? Here are a few articles answering these very questions, which we think are helpful to understanding the reasons why we do not want fourth and fifth level options:


 * http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-rules-for-modern-navigation/
 * https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/hick-s-law-making-the-choice-easier-for-users
 * http://uxmyths.com/post/712569752/myth-more-choices-and-features-result-in-higher-satisfac
 * https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice

I think that your research on hierarchical navigation may be incomplete. Also, your conclusions might be based on a misreading of the sources cited above.

Usually, users can complete tasks more quickly and accurately when using a broad and shallow hierarchy than when using a narrow and deep hierarchy. But that's more of a general trend than an absolute rule. As Kathryn Whitenton at Nielson Norman pointed out, Should your website's hierarchy be flat or deep? Like most design questions, there's no single right answer, and going too far to either extreme will backfire. Flat hierarchies tend to work well if you have distinct, recognizable categories, because people don't have to click through as many levels.

But there are exceptions to every rule. In some situations, there are simply too many categories to show them all at one level. In other cases, showing specific topics too soon will just confuse your audience, and users will understand your offerings much better if you include some intermediate category pages to establish context.

Miller and Remington (2002) found that users completed tasks more quickly and accurately when using a three-level hierarchy than when using a two-level hierarchy, but only when the hierarchy's labels were clear and easy to understand.

Three-level hierarchies do not always work better than four- or five-level hierarchies. The contents of the website must also be taken into account.

Furthermore, it's a fallacy to conclude that simple hierarchies present the user with fewer choices than complex hierarchies. Simple hierarchies have fewer choices *in the hierarchy itself*, but the choices that are offloaded from the global navigation still have to go somewhere. They are usually placed in individual web pages. These pages are either "navigation" pages that were added in order to complete the global navigation; or they are large, complex pages that were formed by merging the contents of smaller pages. Both approaches are just as likely, if not more likely, to overwhelm the user than a global navigation structure that is four or five levels deep.

On my own wiki, thelastdoor, four hierarchical levels are ideal. The first hierarchical level is The Last Door itself. The second level is Chapters (as opposed to Characters, Locations, etc.) The third level is Seasons and the fourth level is Episodes. Now that the global navigation has been restricted to three hierarchical levels, the user cannot navigate directly to a desired episode. Instead, they must navigate to a "Season" page and then navigate again to an "Episode" page. (I should point out that each season only has 5-8 episodes.)

I respectfully suggest that wikis be given the option to use 4 or 5 hierarchical levels.

Sources
 * Whitenton, K. (2013). Flat vs. deep website hierarchies. Nielson Norman Group. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-vs-deep-hierarchy/


 * Miller, C. S., & Remington, R. W. (2002). Effects of structure and label ambiguity on information navigation. In CHI ’02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 630–631). Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: ACM.