There has been some great discussion on the use of breadcrumb navigation as of late. Navigation is an important issue that Webmasters, IT and Search marketers are often faced with when planning online marketing strategies from a usability perspective. We came across a great resource that the Nielsen Norman Group has put together called Information Architecture 2: Navigation Design.
It is a full day tutorial on defining an effective, efficient, and extensible navigation system. The course outline looks pretty impressive covering items such as:
- Purpose of navigation
- Principles of a navigation system
- User behavior: Where do people look on Web pages?
- Most significant navigation issues we see in testing
- Top 10 attributes of effective navigation systems
- Defining navigation system components:
- Global
- Local
- Breadcrumbs
- Utility
- Related links
- Social filters
- Shortcuts/quick links
- Site map/index/guide
- Process/linear
- Pagination
- Tag cloud
- Facets
- Defining navigation system display styles
- Tabs
- Vertical links
- Filmstrip
- Accordion
- Fisheye
- Defining navigation system interaction styles
- Standard hyperlinking
- Landing pages
- Sub-navigation bars
- Drop-down and “mega” drop-down menus
- Fly-out and “mega” fly-out menus
- Cascading menus
- Usefulness, issues and recommendations for various navigation components, display, and interaction styles
- Search and navigation
- How much navigation do users need?
- Tools for defining navigation systems
- Task analysis
- Competitive analysis
- Component inventory
- Task flow
- Navigation mapping
- Documentation: Description, wireframes, and schematics
Sessions run in San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta and New York. The agenda for New York can be found here: http://www.nngroup.com/events/new_york/
Visit http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/info_arch_2.html for more details.Labels: information architecture, navigation, navigation design |
