When you go to a section of the hub, you expect that the big link that says, for example, Sneak!, will take you to the game of Sneak.
But it doesn't. It takes you to a sub-page that shows you the Sneak blurb again. A page that, I guess, allows for sublinks under Sneak.
In addition, there are several elements to an entry kind of crammed together:
- Icon which links to the game
- Title which links to a subpage
- Banner which links to the game
- Text description which may also contain links.
How about something like this...first, allow either an icon or a banner, but not both. There's no clean visual way I can think to allow both.
Second, for page scannability, always have the game name as the left-most item. If it is sometimes the name and sometimes the icon, the eye gets stalled while trying to read down the page.
Third, put everything for an entry on the same line, to reduce clutter and make it easier to support sub-entries.
Fourth, have the game name and the icon/banner be a link to the game.
Deal with sub-entries as indented items with the sub-entry right there so you don't have to go to another page. (People shouldn't put in so many sub-levels that the whole hierarchy can't be displayed on one page. There's just no point, since we're not Yahoo or the Library of Congress, and people get very confused by that sort of thing.)
Here is an attempt at what I'm describing:
DragonSnot | | Because you're the janitor. And it's snot. |
| | |
Living & Dead | | Body switching. Mass murder. Evil plans. Get in here. |
Obviously banners look better than icons in this scheme, but that's okay. The main thing is that it makes the page scannable, it doesn't confuse you as to what a link will do, and it makes it easier to put indented sub-entries in.
What do you think?
I think that basically the nested scheme prevents that possibility, though I can think of two workarounds that would make it more of a possibility.
i) This wouldn't look or work as good, but if a category has no sub-categories, don't make it a clickable link. That way someone wouldn't follow a link thinking that they'd go to the game, because there would be no link to follow.
ii) Give the option of changing the subcategory link to an actual link to the target. That would work the same way as you prescribed, and it would look fine.
And the secret third option,
iii) Have both of the above.