Information Architecture 2: Navigation Design
- Toronto: Tuesday, August 10
- San Francisco: Monday, October 4
- Copenhagen: Tuesday, October 19
- Edinburgh: Friday, October 29
Jen Cardello
Garrett Goldfield
Full-Day Tutorial
Defining a Web-based 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
- Purpose of navigation
- Principles of defining the navigation system
- Difference between the “Wow Factor” and delighting users
- User expectations: Where do people look on Web pages?
- Most significant navigation issues we see in testing
- Top 10 attributes of effective navigation systems
- Tools for analyzing navigation systems
- Tier comparison
- Task flow comparison
- Navigation components tracker
- Navigation system components:
- Global
- Local
- Faceted search
- Breadcrumbs
- Utility
- Related links
- Social filters
- Quick links
- Site map/index
- Process/linear
- Pagination
- Tag clouds
- Navigation patterns and behavior
- Tabs
- Vertical links
- Filmstrip
- Accordion
- Standard hyperlinking
- Landing pages
- Sub-navigation bars
- Drop-down and “mega” drop-down menus
- Fly-out and “mega” fly-out menus
- Cascading menus
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lecture, screenshots, user testing videos, and active participation.
Handouts
Copies of all the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
The course assumes little to no knowledge of IA and is appropriate for anyone responsible for their organization's website, including managers, content contributors, and designers.
See Also:
See our companion course, Information Architecture 1: Structuring and Organizing Web-Based Information.
Instructors
Jen Cardello is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Since 1996, Cardello has
specialized in user-centered and business-focused website strategy, expert reviews, competitive analysis, and
information architecture. She previously led customer experience consulting practices at Gomez Advisors, Watchfire,
and Keynote Systems, advising clients in sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, and lodging.
During this time, she also developed hundreds of user experience criteria for the Keynote Scorecards that benchmark
dozens of financial services websites including banks, brokerages, lenders, and insurance carriers. As principal
of her private practice, Cardello worked with clients in transportation, financial services, publishing, and
education to define user and usage-centered Web strategies and architectures. She has a BFA in architecture
from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Presenting in Toronto, San Francisco, and Copenhagen.
Garrett Goldfield is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, where he consults
with clients in a broad range of industries, including ecommerce, automotive, health care, finance, media,
telecommunications, education, and nonprofits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites. Previously, Garrett
managed the User-Centered Design group for Intuit's Tax Division, focusing on incorporating UCD processes
within Intuit's development cycle for TurboTax software and its Web applications. Prior to working at Intuit,
Goldfield worked at General Electric’s Information Systems Division, where he conducted ground-breaking
work in ecommerce interactions for marketplace transactions; and at The Aerospace Corporation, where he
pioneered standards for HCI telemetry data presentation for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Goldfield's
research focuses on usability testing, contextual inquiry, and ethnographic user studies. He has also published
and presented on cost justification and ROI for usability practices, brainstorming methodologies, analysis, and
interpretation of qualitative user data.
Presenting in Edinburgh.
| 
