Navigation

User experience shape: Designing for engagement

Connecting the shape of UX with stories, personas and dialogues.

"Why do we even need web navigation at all? Well, for one, navigation provides access to the content of a site. But more important, it's the way that it provides access that makes navigation necessary. After all, site search also provides access to content. Why not just have site search and be done with the problem of designing and maintaining a complex navigation system?"

(James Kalbach a.k.a. @JimKalbach ~ Experiencing Information)

Posted on March 27, 2013 | Permalink

Converting search into navigation

This space metaphor gets really to its limits.

"Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible."

(Jakob Nielsen ~ NNGroup)

Posted on March 18, 2013 | Permalink

Why Do We Need Navigation At All?

Structure being narrowed down to traveling through the infosphere as in Apple's HotSauce.

"Regardless of how you organize the content, the larger point is this: giving users a table of contents does much more than simply provide users with a means of navigating the content. The table of contents expresses the hierarchical relationships of your content, and by so doing gives users a sense of your content's overall story and structure. Even if users can't find the answer to their question by navigating the table of contents, they can find other meaning in browsing and perusing the structure of your content."

(Tom Johnson ~ I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted on July 13, 2012 | Permalink

The Elements Of Navigation

The spacial metaphor of information environments (a.k.a. architecture) is strong. Even within mobile apps.

"This article is about the tiniest of details that goes into creating the main centerpiece of your digital product - the construction of the elements of your navigation. This is the most important aid you can possibly give to your users as they are constantly seeking a reason to walk out on you."

(Petter Silfver a.k.a. @psilfver ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on March 22, 2012 | Permalink

tFacet: A tool to build faceted navigation

"The aim is to facilitate ordinary users to formulate semantically unambiguous queries so as to support the fast and precise access to information. Used interaction concepts are e.g. a directory tree and interchangeable columns that are already well-known from other applications. The directory tree, for example, is used to enable the intuitive exploration and selection of hierarchical facets."

(Taxonomy Watch)

Posted on May 19, 2011 | Permalink

Context Menu Design

"A context menu is a menu that contains commands specific to the object that the cursor is currently pointing at – the 'target object'." (Hagan Rivers ~ two rivers consulting)

Posted on March 23, 2011 | Permalink

Guide to Website Navigation Design Patterns

"In web design, there are certain common design patterns that are used for interaction. Site navigation has a wide variety of common and familiar design patterns that can be used as a foundation for building effective information architecture for a website. This guide covers popular site navigation design patterns. For each site navigation design pattern, we will discuss its common characteristics, its drawbacks, and when best to use it." (Cameron Chapman ~ Six Revisions)

Posted on February 08, 2011 | Permalink

Faceted Navigation: Grouping: An UnTapped Potential?

"Research shows that relevant documents (as judged by a user) tend to be thematically related. That means that if is someone finds a relevant document in a collection, chances are documents with a similar subject are also relevant." (James Kalbach ~ Experiencing information)

Posted on December 06, 2010 | Permalink

Findability and Exploration: The future of search

"The majority of people visiting a news website don't care about the front page. They might have reached your site from Google while searching for a very specific topic. They might just be wandering around. Or they're visiting your site because they're interested in one specific event that you cover. This is big. It changes the way we should think about news websites." (Stijn Debrouwere) courtesy of petermorville

Posted on May 04, 2010 | Permalink

Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

"Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade. It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps. In keeping with the principles of progressive disclosure and incremental construction, it lets users formulate the equivalent of a sophisticated Boolean query by taking a series of small, simple steps. Learn how it works, why it has become ubiquitous in e-commerce, and why it’s not for every site." (Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender ~ A List Apart)

Posted on April 20, 2010 | Permalink

Naview: Navigation preview tool for rapid IA prototyping

"Naview is a navigation preview tool for rapid information architecture prototyping from Volkside. It helps information architects design and visualise a new navigational structure and aims to bridge the gap between card sorting and IA user testing." (Volkside) - courtesy of jholland

Posted on August 11, 2009 | Permalink

Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples

"Navigation is the most significant element in web design. Since web-layouts don't have any physical representation a user can stick to, consistent navigation menu is one of the few design elements which provide users with some sense of orientation and guide them through the site. Users should be able to rely on it which is why designers shouldn’t mess around with it." (Smashing Magazine)

Posted on February 27, 2008 | Permalink

Clickstream Study Reveals Dynamic Web

"A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace with the speed of web navigation." (WebSiteOptimization) - courtesy of guuui

Posted on August 10, 2006 | Permalink

Web navigation is about moving forward

"The primary purpose of web navigation is to help people to move forward. It is not to tell them where they have been, or where they could have gone." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 03, 2006 | Permalink

How to build a better web browser

"I'm in the lucky minority of people that have actually designed successful browsers, or parts of them, for any length of time, and with Firefox and Opera in the headlines, and the art of browser design becomes important again, I thought I'd write down some of what I know. Its been years since I was a program manager on the Internet Explorer project, but I’ve maintained interests in the design of navigation and searching systems of all kinds: what follows is a rough summary of what I've learned." (Scott Berkun) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on March 24, 2005 | Permalink

Navigation blindness: How to deal with the fact that people tend to ignore navigation

"Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on links or hit the back button to get there." (Henrik Olsen - guuui)

Posted on January 04, 2005 | Permalink

The myth of navigation

"Data, content and functionality operate in a similar manner in the digital experience. There is a set of data, content, and functionality that exists in a binary form on some hard drive, yet how one interacts with it is through some expression of an interface." (Andrei Herasimchuk - Design by Fire)

Posted on April 07, 2004 | Permalink

The Joy of Navigation Design

"Navigation design isn't just about finding things -- it imbues meaning based on the contexts it provides." (Peter Merholz)

Posted on March 18, 2004 | Permalink

Incorporating Navigation Research into a Design Method 

Presentation by Victor Lombardi at the Information Architecture Summit 2004 (Noise Between Stations)

Posted on March 02, 2004 | Permalink

The Page Paradigm

"In my nine years of working on the Web's user experience, a lot has changed online - but one thing that hasn't changed much is the way that users navigate websites." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience)

Posted on February 20, 2004 | Permalink

Influence of Training and Exposure on the Usage of Breadcrumb Navigation

"Recent studies have shown that while the use of breadcrumb trails to navigate a website can be helpful, few users choose to utilize this method of navigation. This study investigates the effects of 'mere exposure' and training on breadcrumb usage. Findings indicate that brief training on the benefits of breadcrumb usage resulted in more efficient search behavior." (Spring S. Hull - SURL 6.1) - courtesy of lucdesk

Posted on February 20, 2004 | Permalink

Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages

"What this gives me is some justification, I think, for getting content owners to focus on labelling in order to give links in the body of the page excellent scent, and it allows me to feel more comfortable exploring ways to modify the local navigation and even remove it in some cases. It definitely helps to have this kind of data when exploring UI modifications with your team. I expect to track this data in the coming months to see how changes in the navigation scheme impact use." (Michael Angeles)

Posted on February 18, 2004 | Permalink

Rapid navigation in online documents

"(...) to make electronically delivered documents far easier and more practical and faster to work with, by expanding beyond the "help topics" design paradigm. This site covers information structuring; rapid navigation; and designing Help, Web pages, and documents." (About hypertext navigation) - courtesy of victor lombardi

Posted on November 24, 2003 | Permalink

Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage

"Breadcrumb users were found to use the Back button less often than users who did not use the breadcrumb; however, no differences were found in the efficiency measures of total pages visited, navigation bar clicks, embedded link clicks, or time to complete the search tasks." (Bonnie Lida Rogers and Barbara Chaparro - SURL 5.2) - courtesy of webword

Posted on August 14, 2003 | Permalink

Determine the Best Elements for Web Navigation

"Navigation is only one segment of a Web site's information architecture, but it is the most visible segment to the end user." (Jeffrey Linwood - Builder.com)

Posted on June 24, 2003 | Permalink

Web Page Layout: A Comparison Between Left- and Right-Justified Site Navigation Menus

"The usability of two Web page layouts was directly compared: one with the main site navigation menu on the left of the page, and one with the main site navigation menu on the right. Sixty-four participants were divided equally into two groups and assigned to either the left- or the right-hand navigation test condition. Using a stopwatch, the time to complete each of five tasks was measured. The hypothesis that the left-hand navigation would perform significantly faster than the right-hand navigation was not supported. Instead, there was no significant difference in completion times between the two test conditions. This research questions the current leading Web design thought that the main navigation menu should be left justified" (James Kalbach and Tim Bosenick - Journal of Digital Information 4.1)

Posted on April 29, 2003 | Permalink

Site Navigation: Keeping It Under Control

"Navigation is the section of the page that controls what appears in this content area. The beauty of this is that the page content is malleable. The architecture is not, and should represent a strong, extensible foundation that will last at least ten years. It's like building out floors in an office building. You can change the functionality of the floors as needed without changing the structure of the building." (Indi Young - Adaptive Path)

Posted on April 22, 2003 | Permalink

Navigation Research

"A short time ago David Danielson posted a handy list of web navigation resources, and then it disappeared from the Internet. He was nice enough to send it to me, and I'm posting my own version with some of his links and some of my own (...)" (Victor Lombardi)

Posted on April 01, 2003 | Permalink

IT & Society Issue 3, Vol. 1, Winter 2003

Introduction: Web Navigation - Special Editors: Ben Shneiderman, Jonathan Lazar, Melody Ivory (IT & Society)

Posted on March 07, 2003 | Permalink

Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usage

"This textual representation of where and how information is located within the website allows the user to link to major categories of information along a continuum of sequential order." (Bonnie Lida, Spring Hull & Katie Pilcher - SURL Usability News 5.1) - courtesy of webword

Posted on February 06, 2003 | Permalink

Model of Attraction (or Information Magnetism)

"The navigation is the common model used to explain how users interact with the Web. The navigation metaphor tries to provide a framework to explain users moving to and through an information space." (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on January 20, 2003 | Permalink

The Psychology of Navigation

"That's why I don't often use the phrase 'information architect' among the uninitiated. It causes too much trouble." (Jesse James Garrett - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on December 18, 2002 | Permalink

Persuasive Navigation

"Persuasive navigation is navigation that persuades a user to do something." (Jeff Last - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on December 18, 2002 | Permalink

Navigation Complex

"(...) six forms of navigation - three main types and three subtypes." (Peter Paul Koch - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on December 18, 2002 | Permalink

Navigating Information Spaces

"New HCI challenges arise from the emergence of information spaces and the related concept of navigation." (David Benyon - ERCIM News: Human Computer Interaction Special)

Posted on December 02, 2002 | Permalink

Navigation Bars for Hierarchical Web Sites

"The goal of our study was to determine the effectiveness of the selection list navigation bar, an innovation to the standard navigation bar." (David Bowler et al. - SHORE 2001)

Posted on December 01, 2002 | Permalink

Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation

Usability Metrics and User Behavior (David Robert Danielson)

Posted on October 23, 2002 | Permalink

Site Navigation: A Few Helpful Definitions

"(...) collaborating with your team on the design of a navigation system can be difficult unless you all share the same vocabulary when talking about the different parts that make up the navigation UI." (Indy Young - Adaptive Path)

Posted on September 11, 2002 | Permalink

Map-Based Horizontal Navigation in Educational Hypertext

"There are a number of reasons for the horizontal navigation becoming practically extinct." (Peter Brusilovsky and Riccardo Rizzo - Journal of Digital Information 3.1)

Posted on August 15, 2002 | Permalink

Navigational Issues in the Design of On-Line Self-Administered Questionnaires: The Effect of Training and Familiarity

"Dual navigation refers to the act of navigating information records to retrieve specific information, while simultaneously navigating through the survey." (K.L. Norman et al. - HCI Lab. University of Maryland)

Posted on August 06, 2002 | Permalink

Website Structural Navigation

"The structural navigation bar is becoming a ubiquitous element on many websites. (...) This experiment tests whether this type of navigational reference is truly valuable." (N. Lazar and M. Eisenbrey - SHORE 2000)

Posted on July 26, 2002 | Permalink

Requirements for Developing Successful Navigations and User Experiences

"Navigation should mirror, or enhance, the customer interaction that exists offline." (Mary Brodie - Design Interacts) courtesy of iaslash

Posted on February 15, 2002 | Permalink

Content as Navigation Tool

"(...) the journey is more important than the destination" (Christopher Schmitt - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on November 14, 2001 | Permalink

The Evolution of Brand Identity

The Changing Roles of Identity and Navigation Design (Vic Zauderer and Marc Escobosa - WebTechniques)

Posted on October 19, 2001 | Permalink

Usability and Navigation

"(...) we'll look at how you can set up internal links so your visitors can move from page to page with ease." (Andrew Starling - Web Developer's Virtual Library)

Posted on October 17, 2001 | Permalink

Navigating Isn't Fun

"(...) many Web designers have incorrectly deduced from this that users want navigation schemes." (Alan Cooper - Cooper Interaction Design)

Posted on October 10, 2001 | Permalink

Goal-Oriented Navigation Design

"A navigation system should be structured in a way that allows a user to access support for a specific goal as quickly as possible." (Kevin Knabe - Knabe Design)

Posted on October 02, 2001 | Permalink

Can Navigational Assistance Improve Search Experience?

"(...) adding navigational aids to search tools will enhance Web usability" (Mazlita Mat-Hassan and Mark Levene - FirstMonday 6.9)

Posted on September 04, 2001 | Permalink

Impact of Navigational Models on Task Completion in Web-based Information Systems

"This study investigated performance differences between three different web-based navigation models" (Theodore W. Frick et al. - School of Education, Indiana University)

Posted on August 06, 2001 | Permalink

A Comprehension-Based Model of Web Navigation and Its Application to Web Usability Analysis

Peter Polson's Presentation from the May 9, 2001 MOCHI Meeting

Posted on July 10, 2001 | Permalink

Website Navigation is Useful

"Web pages can't be isolated from the rest of the site" (Adam Baker's theory column)

Posted on June 06, 2001 | Permalink

When Kids Use The Web

"A Naturalistic Comparison of Children's Navigation Behavior and Subjective Preferences on Two WWW Sites" (Elliot Soloway et al.)

Posted on June 05, 2001 | Permalink

Basic Navigation Concepts for Interaction

"(...) a group of instructional designers interested in practical application of research to the design of instructional and performance support software" (Elizabeth Boling - Interface Interest and Research Group / Indiana University)

Posted on June 04, 2001 | Permalink

Playing The Links

"Interactivity and Stickiness in .Com and 'Not.Com' Web Sites" (Deborah Shaw - First Monday)

Posted on March 11, 2001 | Permalink

Rapid Navigation in Online Documents

"Design of documents and viewers to support structured hypertext and easy skimming" (Michael Hoffman - Hypertextnavigation)

Posted on March 01, 2001 | Permalink

SiteNavigation.net

"Everything in Site Navigation" (The Navigator : Sanjay Bhatgaonkar)

Posted on January 04, 2001 | Permalink

Design Science Journal

"(...) 99 percent of the interactivity on the Web today is navigation" (Ignition Design)

Posted on November 02, 2000 | Permalink

Elements of Hypermedia Design

"Techniques for Navigation and Visualization in Cyberspace" (Peter Gloor et al. - Birkhauser Boston)

Posted on October 05, 2000 | Permalink

Social Navigation: A Design Approach

"(...) an example of a socially enhanced information space" (Swiki and Formatting Rules)

Posted on September 22, 2000 | Permalink

Wayfinding in Large-Scale Virtual Worlds

"(...) a study of human wayfinding in virtual worlds" (Rudolph P. Darken)

Posted on September 15, 2000 | Permalink

XML Document Navigation Language

"(...) the navigation of content which helps the user to easily browse a huge document on relatively small devices." (W3C Note - NEC)

Posted on August 02, 2000 | Permalink

Structured Information: Navigation, Access and Control

"Structured information is information that is analyzed." (Steve J. DeRose 1995)

Posted on July 21, 2000 | Permalink

Navigation Design

"(...) how to improve the architecture of Web Information Systems using design patterns" (Gustavo Rossi et al. in WWW8 Conference Refereed Papers)

Posted on July 12, 2000 | Permalink

Website Navigation

Design in Infospace (Web Developer's Virtual Library)

Posted on June 03, 2000 | Permalink

Seven Steps to Easier Web Navigation

(Constance Petersen - Enterprise Development)

Posted on May 15, 2000 | Permalink