User Experience 2008
Chicago
Nov 2-7		 Amsterdam
Nov 16-21

Information Architecture 2: Navigation

  • Chicago: Tuesday, November 4
  • Amsterdam: Tusday, November 18

Jen Cardello
Full-Day Tutorial

Defining a navigation system can often devolve into an opinionated game of politics or a mad grab at the technology of the week. But 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 a case for change)
  • Which navigation components suit different site 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
    • Pull-down menus
    • Roll-over/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.

See Also:

Companion course: Information Architecture 1: Structure in Context.

Instructor:

photo of Jen Cardello 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 where she advised clients in sectors including 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. Cardello holds a BFA in Architecture from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.