Beautiful fonts are one of the holy grails of Web Design.  Along with CSS-based equal height columns, better support for image transparency, browsers that all display pages the same (or at the very least the death of IE6), and a vending machine stocking drinks with higher caffeine content than Mountain Dew, the ability to use any font we want in a page design would make us (mostly) very happy indeed.

There is something to be said for sticking with a fairly limited set of fonts for the main content of your site.  After all, people actually have to read what we write and our usual set of fonts are nicely readable for the most part.  But when it comes to headlines we may want to use something a bit more elegant than Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Georgia.

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Testing a Web site is a pretty big, and not often inexpensive, task. Cara already posted about some inexpensive tools for user-testing wireframes. But for your design, there’s an opportunity to go even lower-budget than that.

To do testing truly on the cheap, there is a new tool called fivesecondtest.com. It’s a way to test designs in five seconds or less. You upload your design, and then you can either invite specific users to test it, or you can open your test to the entire 5 second community. You have the option of creating memory tests or click tests. And as the name suggests, a tester looks at the design for five seconds, letting you know what items stand out on the page.

Of course, this is a very simplified approach. There is no task-based testing. As the site states, the tool is meant to “help you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.” Nothing more, nothing less. And if you open up your design to the entire five second community, you’re likely not getting results from an average-joe user, but usability and design experts.

There are some paid plans that allow you to do some more sophisticated testing. But if you’re budget is beyond tight, it may be worthwhile to just upload an image and see what the testers say.

We all know that testing your wireframes to make sure your priority audiences can complete key tasks on your website-in-progress is a good idea – but is there an inexpensive way to do it? I was alerted to an online tool yesterday that can help you conduct tests quickly, easily and inexpensively, too.

Optimal Workshop’s Chalkmark (http://www.optimalworkshop.com/chalkmark_alt.htm) makes usability testing a snap. First identify the tasks you would like your audience to complete. Next, upload the image of your wireframe. Invite your audience(s) to participate and then wait for the results to roll in. The test results are returned in the form of a heat map (see image). You can immediately see where people chose to click on your wireframe to complete the task you put forward. Of course Chalkmark can’t give you all of the information you would get from true wireframe prototype testing, but if budget is a concern, some information is better than no information. And feedback directly from the audience your site is trying to reach? Priceless.

chalkmark heat map

A couple of months ago, I was frustrated with several academic journal websites which did not have the necessities of web 2.0 sharing features which can make their site useful to the new generation of scholars.  The suggestions I gave centered around adding “share this” or “add this” functionality that would allow site visitors to add a link to their delicious bookmarks, share it with their friends on facebook or twitter, or possibly send to a friend via email.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

This is the second in our NTEN series. Check out Part 1: Card Sorting for NTEN – Behind the Scenes.

After completing card sorting exercises and drafting a new information architecture with NTEN, we moved on to the next step: usability testing with wireframe prototypes!

Testing with Wireframes

We most often use usability testing in two ways:

1. To evaluate an existing site and identify areas of improvement
2. To evaluate a new enhancement, redesign, or information architecture — something that doesn’t actually exist yet

Our project with NTEN falls into the second category. So, how do you test something that doesn’t yet exist? We used wireframes:

By quickly sketching out the new navigation and some key content pages, we were able to produce an interactive prototype. (more…)

The iPhone is arguably the most advanced piece of technology commonly found in people’s hands these days. It has a GPS to tell you where you are. It has a phone to let you communicate with people. It has a multi-touch LCD screen that lets the user use the device with no more and no less than one button. The iPhone is a computer … with the Internet. Ten years ago, try to imagine describing to someone what an iPhone does and they’d think that you were talking Sci-Fi. Well, folks, as much as people like to deny it, Science Fiction becomes reality every day in our world.

Jules Verne could see us going to the moon, and John F. Kennedy  actually pushed our country to do it. Star Trek could see us using tri-corders, and Motorola created it as the first cell phone. In my opinion, the iPhone, it’s market of applications, and growing user base is the best way to gain access to and interact with information. It also helps you get in touch with people, but I think face to face is the best way to interface with other humans.

Over the course of my trip to New York City this weekend, I realized exactly how valuable my iPhone is. When I got off my bus at 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I wanted to use my gym membership at the sports club. I went online on my iPhone, looked up the nearest 24 hour gym in their network, and copied and pasted the address into the Google Maps application. In about 2 minutes, I was on my way. After I arrived and couldn’t get into the side of the building which was advertised, I looked up the phone number online, gave them a call and got in. That’s convenience.

The sports club’s web site is not optimized for the iPhone, but since the built-in Safari Browser is a full-fledged browser, I was able to navigate with some effort and get what I needed. If the web site was actually created for the iPhone, it would have saved me some time from zooming in and out, panning left and right to get around. If they had an "app" for that, I might have been able to log into it with my account and it would have been geo-location aware of where I was and tell me the nearest branches of the club. Why don’t they create an "app for that"?

This is all possible and contradictory to popular belief, the functionality that I just described doesn’t have to be developed as an iPhone Application. Much of the functionality can be created in HTML as a web application and placed on the Internet. Google has done a great job by making all of their applications as iPhone friendly "webapps" which behave like iPhone applications.

Recently, some plugins have been released to make your WordPress blog iPhone friendly. Available at Brave New Code, the WPTouch Mobile Theme and Plugin for WordPress takes your standard WordPress blog and makes it look, feel, and behave as an iPhone application with nice transitions.

Static Content Sites

Many organizations have also released informational web sites in a handy, iPhone friendly format. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information. Web Apps such as the Athens Tourist Guide :  and Pocket Cambridge : are basically lists and tables of static HTML that look nice on an iPhone or an iTouch. Do you have information that can be useful to iPhone users? There are some really easy ways to get it out there.

1. iWebKit – “Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod  touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license. In the first 4 months of it’s existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!”

2. iUI – It has the following

1. Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
2. Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
3. Ability to handle phone orientation changes
4. Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Dynamic Content Sites

Do you have programming ability or resources which you can utilize to push out your content from your organizational and institutional databases? You can probably use the aforementioned tools in conjunction with dynamic server side languages, but you might want to look into the following options to make your life easy.

1. ComponentOne iPhone Studio – ComponentOne’s studio is a rich set of ASP.NET Server Controls which is beyond compare when it comes to giving you a competitive advantage in creating dynamic applications fast. Some of the included server controls are : Calendar, ViewPort, CoverFlow ( Like the iTunes record browser ), and MultiView ( like the Photo explorer in the iPhone Camera application ).

2. iWebKit for Grails – This plugin provides integration with iWebkit, a powerful User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. By using this plugin, the grail developer will have an iphone web app skeleton (CSS and javascript) but also a extended tag library helping in creating iphone web pages in an easy,clean and fast way. If you are a Java developer or your company has them, and have gotten the hang of Groovy, this might be the path for you.

3. iUI with Asp.NET – iUI is very simple and some people have taken some steps to create their own integration for ASP.NET and iUI. This page points you to some third party resources which may be helpful for you in creating dynamic iUI applications.

Possible Scenarios and Tips

How can you capitalize on the iPhone and iTouch user? Here are some ideas which may work out for you.

1. If you have a Calendar of events, you can add iCalendar format links which can let users download the event data and add it to their iPhone Calendar.

2. If you have a location or event search which requires an address or a zip code, you can use W3C’s Geolocation API which is supported by the built-in Safari browser on iPhones.

3. If you have a member’s only directory, you can create an interface which can list people’s information as well as publish their contact info in the vCard format so that they can add it to their contact lists.

We’re excited to be working with the Nonprofit Technology Network to re-architect their website, NTEN.org. As each stage of the project is completed, we’ll share a behind-the-scenes recap about the process. First up: Card Sorting!

Card sorting is a common technique used to gather input from representative audiences about how they think about your information. Traditionally, participants are given cards representing pieces of content (or sections of your website) and asked to organize those cards in a way that makes sense to them. The process can also take place remotely, using online tools, as we’ve detailed below. When re-structuring any website, card sorting is an important step to ensure that the new site structure is as intuitive as possible for visitors.

Preparation

To create the list of items (or “cards”) to be sorted, we used two inputs:

• A content inventory, which is a list of all content/pages on the site. The list is created in a spreadsheet which clearly shows the current structure of the site and which main section each item is currently categorized into.
• A list of the website’s audiences and their primary goals or tasks. This helps to ensure that every key task is represented by a content item in the card sort, and it is crucial for usability testing (which will be a later step in our process).

We ended up with a list of 47 items that represented key content from NTEN’s website. The list was then loaded into Websort. Websort provides virtual card sorting, allowing participants to drag and drop cards into categories, then label those categories.

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Web analytics is usually left to marketers looking to fine-tune shopping carts, hone in on AdWords, track campaigns, and conduct a whole bevy of marketing tasks. Creative-types and IA folks don’t always dive into this kind of data. But when a site is undergoing a creative or architectural facelift, it is the perfect time to dive into analytics and make the right decisions.

Creative Decisions:

Analytics packages can tell you a lot about the technology your audience uses. Some stats worth looking at include:

• Resolution;
• Browser;
• Flash Version;
• Java.

Are 75% of your users at 1024×768? Then maybe it’s time to break out of that limiting 800×600 design. Do 30% of your users still in IE6? Avoid transparent images. 5% of your users don’t have Flash or Java? Make sure you offer alternatives to that nifty Slideshow on the homepage (which you should do anyway, but that is another post for another day).

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I’m very pleased to announce the release of Beaconfire’s new white paper – Is Multivariate Testing Right for You? A Guide for Nonprofits.

We’ve become big fans of multivariate testing (MVT) as a powerful, flexible, and often under-utilized way to optimize websites based on real users’ behavior.  We’ve also seen nonprofits gain insights through MVT that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to learn.  It’s a great way to learn what drives your visitors to get involved or donate through your website, and can be applied to support almost any of your online goals.

This white paper is a guide to understanding just what MVT is all about, what’s required to take advantage of it, and whether it’s a good fit for your nonprofit.  You’ll also learn how the optimization process works, from planning to analysis, and how to get started with an MVT program that meets your needs.

The paper is available for download now at http://www.beaconfire.com/mvt.

This is the second article in a series on usability. Read the first article.

It was inevitable – my bracket has been decimated. But managing brackets in four different applications, I’ve learned that not only do I have no knowledge of college basketball, but also how to take Bracketology to a whole new level.

An NCAA tournament bracket needs tells you a lot in just a little bit of space. It needs to convey information about teams, regions, game details, and other news. And it needs to do it 64 times (65 if you count the play-in game).

So let’s set our monitors to 1024×768, and see how the final four perform.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year…if you’ve ever painted your face your school colors, or stuck a pom-pom in your hair, you know what I’m talking about. It’s March Madness, baby! (Otherwise known NCAA Division I Basketball Chapmionship). And that means it’s bracket time.

This year my team (GW) did not make it into the tournament. Still, I’ve got my bracket ready, and the pools are awaiting my dominance. I have created and/or have been invited to participate in pools by enough people that I’m actually using four different systems. And putting together my bracket of winners turned out to be more frustrating than I thought. Some of the companies that put together these brackets are multi-million dollar conglomerate corporations. You’d think they should be able to get usability, right?

And thus was born…THE MARCH MADNESS OF USABILITY. I’ll compare some of the top tournament sites to see what usability lessons we can glean. The sites I’m using this year include Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, Facebook, and ESPN.

Today’s topic: Registering

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Does your site scream out, “I haven’t changed my image since 1995!” Or maybe, your pages are plagued by lengthy copy that just keeps going and going… Perhaps your web presence just doesn’t really reflect all the great work your organization does.

If you happen to be in Portland, Oregon next Tuesday night, Feb 24th, and have a website in need of some TLC, come to the NTEN 501Tech Club and Net Squared MeetUp to problem-solve cures for the “common” website. Yours truly, Beaconfire Creative Director Eve Simon, will be leading the discussion. See you there!

Answer:  Multivariate Testing (or MVT)

So what is it?  According to Wikipedia:

…multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. Split tests and A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations…In a nutshell, multivariate testing can be seen as allowing website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal.

Two Beaconfire staffers, Shiloh and Jo, recently won our Leadership & Innovation Award for their work on MVT, and I had the opportunity to sit down with them and find out more about it.

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A group of association executives from a variety of organizations joined Jeff, Amy, and me last Friday, November 14 at the Greater Washington Board of Trade to talk about web usability testing and how it can improve the online member experience.

After a short networking reception and introductions, Amy, one of Beaconfire’s information architecture and usability consultants, led us through a brief discussion of what usability testing is and why it’s used.  Often, when organizations are designing or redesigning their Web sites, the focus can end up being primarily internal.  That can result in a site that makes sense to association staff but is incomprehensible to members and other constituents.  Usability testing shifts the focus to the user to ensure that your audiences can find what they’re looking for and accomplish what they want to do online.

Amy recommended that usability testing should be a continuing process throughout the entire development and design project to keep the new Web site on track.  Organizations sometimes skip usability testing because they fear it will be too costly.  Amy dispelled that myth by sharing a general rule that, while well known among information architects, came as a bit of a surprise to the session participants:  you can find 90% of the problems on a page with only five testers.

That said, there are a number of factors to consider when engaging in usability testing:

• Where are you in your process?
• What’s your budget, not only in terms of money but also of time and staff resources?
• Who are your audiences?

Amy and Jeff then walked through the various types of usability testing Beaconfire recommends, ranging from heuristic analysis, in which a small number of experts evaluate the Web site against a pre-determined set of usability criteria, through card sorting, which can be done face to face or online, into wireframe prototype testing and even post-launch function testing on the live site.

Amy then led two volunteers through a live wireframe prototype testing exercise both to demonstrate to the participants how usability testing works and to show how much can be learned just from asking two different people to try to accomplish the same task on a wireframe site.

For more information about usability testing, check out the presentation from Friday, read the BFWire interview on usability testing with Amy and Brad, another member of Beaconfire’s functional analysis team, or feel free to contact us to discuss your needs.

Beaconfire is hosting a round table in downtown Washington DC from 3-5 pm on Friday, November 14 on the topic of Web Usability for Associations: Designing for Your Members.

During this casual gathering, we will share examples from some associations we’ve worked with, showing how small changes to their Web sites led to major improvements across a wide range of online activities: joins, renewals, registrations, purchases, participation, advocacy, and volunteering.

The session is designed to encourage networking and learning. A wine and cheese reception will be followed by a short presentation of several association case studies and a free-flowing discussion about how your association can implement, test, and benefit from usability improvements.

For more information, please contact Elizabeth Weaver Engel at elizabeth.engel@beaconfire.com or 703.894.0080 x257.

• Are you regularly disappointed with the results of your online campaigns?
• Does your organization keep missing your Web traffic and engagement goals?
• Are users consistently bailing out of key transactions before completing them?
• Did you have to hire an extra staff person to deal with all the calls and emails from constituents who can’t find things on your Web site?
• Is your site a victim of “suburban sprawl,” as additional elements keep getting bolted onto a navigational structure that was never designed to support them?
• Are you thinking about a complete redesign but don’t know where to start?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, it might be time to consider doing a Web site usability audit.

In an ideal world, usability testing should follow on the heels of the design process as part of any site launch, but in the excitement of the new design and the rush to get the site up and running, it’s often overlooked.  Even if your organization performed thorough usability testing at launch, you need to take a critical look at your site from the perspective of how it works as opposed to how it looks periodically to guarantee it’s still working as it should.  The more vital your Web site is to your organization’s business goals, the more frequently you need to do this (Amazon.com, for instance, does significant usability testing every single day).

I recently had the opportunity to talk with two of Beaconfire’s usability experts, functional analysts Amy Knox and Brad Lehman, to learn a little more about the usability testing process.

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I’m the guy here at Beaconfire that, more often than not, codes the HTML pages that turn your elegant, professional, or enticing new site design into dynamic, active, enticing Web pages. It’s what happens between the designer working in Photoshop, and our crack development team building the site in whatever CMS you’ve decided to go with.

I love coding pages. Each design brings with it new challenges and figuring out how to bring the collaboration between the client and design team to glorious click-able life is always fun for me. As Web design continues to become more mature and sophisticated and the technologies available to us become more dynamic and interactive, this job just gets more and more interesting.

Lately, most sites that we’ve designed, built, or both, have called for some sort of “flyout” navigation (American Legacy, Bronx Zoo, Bread for the World, AFSCME). An aside: some people call this kind of navigation “dropdowns,” but I feel that suggests that a click might be involved (as in dropdowns in online forms), whereas the the word “flyout” more specifically describes something that appears when you simply move your mouse over an object. So for the purposes of this post, I will now dispense with the quotes around the word and just refer to flyouts.

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It’s easy to take web conventions for granted, like the fact that the logo links to the homepage, and is featured at the top left. Often, when we put our recommendations together, we put some basic information in about what should be where. Because our suggestions often reflect well-worn conventions, our clients accept them.

But once in a while, a client will ask the unthinkable: “How do you know that is the right thing to do?”

When this happens, you need to be ready to explain yourself, or you look like you are Just Making Stuff Up. Recently, one of our clients asked us about the search box – “Where should the search really be placed?”

In addition to our experience doing user testing (where we get to see people responding to various designs in real time), we look to studies like this one from SURL, and then look to build on our knowledge through documented experience where possible.

The SURL study shows the areas that the user looked to find internal search on a site, both for new and experienced users (the darker the area, the more likely a user looked in that area of the page).

Additionally, we can find case studies like this one (pdf), which walks through one site’s search change and the results. It shouldn’t be surprising that their efforts, moving the search box to one of the key locations identified in the SURL study, produced results.

So there you have it, for the search box anyway. Next up… well, what do you want to know about?

It’s no small task to wrangle a website and its resources in one language – let alone multiples.  If you’re taking the time and making the effort to post multilingual content, you’re creating potentially valuable assets for your users around the globe.  You want to make sure that the content is represented accurately and is accessible. 

Recently one of  our clients asked us to weigh in on the presentation of multi-lingual content on their site – an organization with members around the world that produces publications, trainings and other web-specific content in a number of languages. The client wondered how to present the information in an accessible and useful way to their users.

While not an exhaustive list, these points can serve as a backbone for your multilingual content presentation.  The first distinction to make is whether the site is fully mirrored in multiple languages or if it is presenting a limited number of pages.

If the full content exists in multiple languages, providing tabbed navigation to each language (with the full built-out resources under each) is an effective presentation. The International Center for Journalists’ IJNet site does a good job of this. When you click a language tab, the entire page content and all navigation swap out to the language you’ve selected. You don’t want to promise more content than you can deliver, though, so be careful of setting up a parallel nav structure and re-directing users back to English content for non-translated content.  The effect is jarring and, frankly, inconsiderate.   

If your multi-lingual content is limited, you want to make sure you don’t portray the fact that when you click on a language, you’re getting the same content in another language. Presenting a limited number of resources is best handled by directing users to “Resources in…” (or Pages in or Materials in – whatever works best for the audience). A user can then click through to a landing page that aggregates the non-English content by type.

Link placement on the page is critical. Links to multilingual content (even if it’s not a full parallel site) should be displayed prominently and placed above the fold. Providing content in multiple languages takes a significant investment of time and resources. And if you are making the investment, you most likely want to showcase the international consideration and reach of your organization. What you don’t want to do is force users looking for non-English content to hunt around the homepage to find the link, effectively negating the time and energy you’ve put behind developing these resources.

The visual and functional treatment of links is vital as well. The easy one first, you don’t want to use as the visual representation of languages. While they may provide a dash of color, flags represent countries, not languages. What flag would you use to represent Portuguese language content – Portugal or Brazil? Don’t even get me started on the options for Spanish language content.

Another bad idea… including a drop-down menu with language choices. This treatment does save space within your page layout but it creates a challenge for languages that are character-based such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

While listing out each of the language options in their “native” spelling may take more space, it allows non-English reading users to identify their preferred language easily. Also, displaying each content language also serves to showcase your organization’s commitment to international audiences.  InfoComm currently does this on their site.    In addition, to ensure they appear correctly you should use images for the nav items, as opposed to text based labels, to ensure that the labels display as intended. Most computers can handle all language characters but some cannot.

Where should limited multi-lingual resources live on the back-end? I’d suggest they live in the file structure with the parallel English pages. That way, the file structure makes sense in terms of linking and, if (when!) the content grows to a level where a parallel or sub-site can exist, it will be easy to find & identify the resources.

If you are presenting multilingual content, Kudos!  If you’re considering it, bahati njema, Bonne chance,  Buena suerte, Danke, Good luck, Lykke til, Sretno and Желаю вам удачу!

If  only getting to a site’s homepage was as simple as clicking your heels.

Typically I spend the days clicking away on my computer in the Beaconfire offices high above Arlington.  However, this past week my colleague Mark and I wrapped up a series of usability testing sessions for one of our esteemed clients.  It was a fascinating couple days.  During the testing sessions, we forayed into a health system  and found ourselves meeting with people who spend their days saving lives.  It was humbling, certainly, and also quite informative.  We discovered what happens in the Apheresis lab.  We repeatedly heard that you would not go to a cardiologist to have coronary artery bypass surgery; you’d see a cardiac surgeon for that.  Good things to know.

And, we discovered that some of what we techies have come to consider usability standards don’t seem to actually have cemented themselves as standards yet.  One of the most significant discoveries is that the use of a logo in the upper-left corner as the primary avenue to return to a site’s homepage is not yet a universally known convention. 

In the process of our low-fidelity prototype testing, we started each task on the prototype’s homepage.  Once the users completed the first task – helping Cousin Louisa find where she could have an MRI and what she needed to know to prepare for the procedure – users were told to return to the homepage to start the next task.  How did users get back home?

1. They clicked the “Back” arrow on the browser.
2. They clicked the “HOME” icon on the browser. 
3. They asked us how to get back home.

What did users not do?  They did not click on the logo to return to the homepage.  Nor did they seem to notice the “HOME” link in the breadcrumb trail at the top of each page.

Okay, okay, okay.  I’m exaggerating.  Of the 15 people we tested with, two people clicked the logo in the upper-left hand corner to return to the homepage.  And, of the same 15, two others found the breadcrumbs and clicked those.  Eleven people used the browser “Back” arrow to get to the homepage after each of the six tasks we presented.  Many of them mentioned that they expected to see “a box that says Home at the top” of the primary navigation items.  Others suggested that it could live somewhere at the top of the page above the search.  Either way, they wanted an explicit navigation item that said HOME outside of the body content.

Our testing sessions provided a lot of rich data that will inform our work on this project and others going forward.  While we may think getting people home is just a matter of clicking the logo (once, not three times in this case) it seems that, for now, we still need to provide an explicit nav item that will get folks there.