Usability Week 2009
San Francisco
Jun 22-27
New York
Jul 13-17
Sydney
Jul 27-Aug 1
Edinburgh
Sep 14-18

Information Architecture 2: Navigation Design

  • San Francisco: Saturday, June 27
  • New York: Friday, July 17
  • Sydney: Saturday, August 1
  • Edinburgh: Tuesday, September 15

Garret Goldfield
Full-Day Tutorial

Defining a navigation system can often devolve into an opinionated game of office politics or a mad grab at the technology of the week. To ensure quality, your navigation design should be driven by a user-centered design methodology.

The best starting point for defining an effective, efficient, and extensible navigation system is to understand human behavior, the scope of navigation components and styles, your business needs, and your users’ mission-critical tasks.

In this seminar, we’ll explore navigation components and menu styles and give you the tools you need to make informed navigation design decisions.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • How to evaluate your existing navigation system’s effectiveness (and how to make the business case for change)
  • Which navigation components suit different website purposes, task scenarios, and content types/structure
  • The pros and cons of different menu styles
  • How users employ both search and navigation to complete tasks
  • What you should (and should not) do to ensure user success and situational awareness

Course Outline

  • Navigation design: Overview
    • What is a navigation system?
    • Common pitfalls in navigation design
  • Theory: Information seeking
    • Modes
    • Behaviors
  • Evaluating a navigation system
    • Business needs: Current and future
    • User intentions
    • Task analysis
    • User testing
  • Navigation system components
    • Global
    • Local
    • Linear
    • Relative (content-, behavior-, or profile-driven)
    • Breadcrumbs
    • Utility (header, footer)
    • Short cuts/quick links
    • Site maps/indices/guides
    • Recently viewed
    • Recommended content
    • Timelines
    • Lists
    • Tag clouds
  • Filtering and prioritizing navigation items
    • Social filtering
    • Short vs. full menus
  • Menu styles
    • Static menus
    • Tabs
    • Expanding/contracting menus
    • Context-sensitive menus
    • Pulldown menus
    • Rollover/fly-out menus
    • Cascading menus
    • Fisheye
    • Accordion
    • Carousels and slide shows
    • Spatial
  • Labels
  • Search and navigation
  • How many types of navigation do users need? And what’s too much?
  • Defining the navigation system
    • Where navigation design fits in the overall design process
    • Design exploration
    • Design documentation

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lecture and exercises.

Handouts

Copies of all the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

Anyone responsible for their organization's website or intranet, whether in user experience, management, or engineering.

Related

See our companion course: Information Architecture 1.

IA1 covers the underlying structure of the site, whereas IA2 covers the presentation of this structure in the user interface. Structure and navigation combine to form an integrated user experience, but they are different concepts and raise different usability issues, which are explored in these two seminars.

Instructor

photo of Garrett Goldfield Garrett Goldfield is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. Previously at Intuit Inc., Garrett managed the User-Centered Design (UCD) group for Intuit's Tax Division. At Intuit he focused on incorporating UCD processes within Intuit's development cycle for TurboTax software and its Web applications. At Nielsen Norman Group, Goldfield has consulted for clients in a broad range of industries, including e-commerce, automotive, health care, financial, media, telecommunications, education, and nonprofits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites. He has published works in various journals and proceedings and has presented original research at several conferences, including: Usability Professionals Association, Institute for International Research, HCI International, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), and the Northern California Association for Behavioral Analysis. Garrett co-founded the San Diego chapter of SIGCHI and held the position of Chair for the organization. Garrett has also consulted on the User-Centered Design curriculum at National University, San Diego Campus. Prior to working at Intuit, Goldfield worked at General Electric’s Information Systems Division where he conducted ground-breaking work in the area of e-commerce interactions for marketplace transactions, and at The Aerospace Corporation where he pioneered standards for the presentation of HCI telemetry data for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Goldfield's research has focused on the areas of usability testing, contextual inquiry and ethnographic user studies. In addition he has published and presented information on cost justification and return on investment for usability practices, brainstorming methodologies, analysis, and interpretation of qualitative user data.