---
title: "Using the Proximity Principle to Design Online Help Navigation"
date: 2012-08-13
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/08/13/using-the-proximity-principle-to-design-online-help-navigation/
---
# Using the Proximity Principle to Design Online Help Navigation
> Items relating to each other should be grouped close together. When several items are in close proximity to each other, they become one visual unit rather than several separate units. This helps organize information, reduces clutter, and gives the reader a clear structure. (p.13)

In designing a business card, for example, you should probably put your address information in the same place. It would look odd to put your street on the left, your state on the right, and your zip code at the top. We expect to see like content appear in approximately the same location.

In designing information, we follow the same principle, right? We group our help topics into similar books so the reader can find the information. Some topics may share properties with other groups, somewhat like the platypus shares properties with mammals, birds, and reptile classes. But by and large we can roughly organize content into similar groups.

The problem is that even if topics are grouped in the same book in a table of contents (TOC), users don't often navigate using the TOC. They navigate through keyword searches, cross-reference links, and context-sensitive links from within an application. Navigating outside the TOC, the content no longer appears grouped together, as it was initially designed.

When you break content up into multiple  topics, you lose some of the proximity that good information design would exemplify. At the worst, users may perceive the help topics to be fragmented, isolated from each other, and scattered about.

Rather than grouping content in books in the TOC, we could also group topics another way: on the same page. Instead of using the TOC as the main method of navigation, we could use the TOC to list a series of concepts, and then group all the subtopics related to each concept on that concept's homepage. This way, the user always sees similar content together, in one place, regardless of how the user navigated to the content.

I recently overhauled the help for one of my products with this approach. You can see it here: [https://ue.ldschurch.org/ldsapphelp/calendar](https://ue.ldschurch.org/ldsapphelp/calendar).

![I moved the additional topics that would normally appear in the TOC to the page itself, below the concept. These additional topics appear as drop-down hotspots.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/newhelporganization.png)

I wanted to avoid the typical multi-level, intimidating TOC approach with help systems. (For reasons why, see my post [Applying Progressive Information Disclosure to Online Help Navigation](https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/08/09/applying-progressive-information-disclosure-to-online-help-navigation/).) Instead, each entry in the TOC is more like an article, with many topic sections.

To avoid a really long page, I collapsed most of the information in hotspots and togglers on the page. The user can expand the sections he or she wants to read more about.

This approach to organizing help makes the content a lot cleaner. Readers aren't overwhelmed from the start. Instead, readers navigate to a page and pick and choose the information they want to see. Readers don't need to expand book and sub-book and sub-sub-sub book as they glance through dozens of topics, which begin to fill and expand the left side of their screen like an expanding hurricane.