I’d note that in the Fidelity study, the “flyout” navigation structure which did poorly in their tests referred specifically to vertical flyout navigation. They mention ‘the problem of the diagonal’ which can be a problem indeed. The issue occurs when a user opens a vertical flyout menu, spots the 2nd level item they want, attempts move their mouse to click on it and the nav disappears and the menu of the item below appears. Ergh – that one gets me more than I’d like to admit!

The horizontal flyout, which Fidelity called “Dropdown”, scored quite well as did the Yahoo style, which displays all 2nd level nav on the homepage.

You posit that presenting two levels of navigation may undermine our careful consideration of top-level navigation labels. I’d like to assure you that is not the case. Through our IA process, categories three levels deep are defined separately from the design and technical considerations (specifically, how the navigation will display). Can users make decisions without the second level visible? I certainly hope so.

In general, when users have a task in mind that they wish to complete on a particular site, they will continue to click through a transaction as long as they feel (and the site reinforces) that they are moving in a forward direction. It is akin to participating in a treasure hunt where you are baited along a path with the booty being the successful completion of your transaction or search for information. Online the behavior of continued clicking in pursuit of an anticipated reward is called “satisficing.”

It’s a bit of a conundrum – do we want users to feel that they have worked hard for a desired end and therefore savor the sweet success? Or do we want to provide efficient, direct pathways for users that allow them to accomplish their task easily and move on to the next? Okay, maybe less a conundrum than I originally thought.

One might initially think that this would be a good reason to use flyout navigation, but I’m not sure that it is. As long as your top level navigation links to pages that have nice, accessible second-level navigation, GoogleBot will not only be able to index your site easily, but it will be indexing that second level of navigation along with the content contextual to it. I’m not totally sure, but this may, in fact, further optimize your search results. Certainly, one should never, ever, substitute “on the page” second-level navigation with flyouts. The flyouts should *never* be the only way to those pages.