Week 4 - Designing Web navigation Systems

Everybody who’s driven a car at any point in their lives knows there’s that day you can’t forget when you got lost in an unfamiliar area or city or part of a city you’re not accustomed with. It’s frustrating and confusing experience which always leads to anger and even fear. Thank god for GPS technology and smart phones today!

Navigating through websites, even though might not cause fright, can sometimes lead to frustration and anger when you find yourself literally lost with the system/site. Your navigation system, simply put is the important part of the IA. If people can’t navigate comfortably and find stuff easily within your site, you might as well not have a website in the first place. We should be able to know where we are, what is it, where was I initially, how do I get back to where I was and what can I do here.

There exist different types of navigation systems:

·          Embedded navigation systems which include global, local and contextual navigation systems integrated and infused within the web pages themselves. Most large websites integrate these three navigation systems, with each solving specific problems

·         Supplemental navigation systems which include sitemaps, indexes, guides (wizards and configurations), and search that exist outside the content bearing pages with different ways of accessing the same information. They are external to the basic hierarchy of a web site and provide other choices for finding and completing tasks. They are very critical in ensuring usability, searchabiliy and findability within large web sites. They might sometimes be overlooked by both site owners and usability pundits who usually focus more on taxonomy and simplicity and miss the very important point that the taxonomy and the embedded navigation systems will fail for a significant percentage of users and tasks.

Designing the navigation user takes IAs to the user experience design, which involves integrating IA, interaction design, information design, visual design and usability engineering. Here, the skills within each is of these domains is going to cross paths such that the end-user gets the best experience when they access your site. Hence the IA has a series of factors to consider when they’re putting their navigation system in place.

·         If your site or intranet is going to be accessed on the web, you’ll have to consider inbuilt features within web browsers like internet explorer, google chrome or Firefox which end users will use to access the site. On the other hand we have Open URL which permits us to directly access any page on a web site.

·         Defining reference points to easily tell the end user where they are or guide them to easily find themselves within the system is very important.

·         Context is the King in the design of navigation systems. Unlike in real life where landmarks and cardinal points to guide us find our way around, in the online information world you usually have the “you’re on your own” feeling of isolation in which you constantly find yourself in the middle of unfamiliar sites and have to make sense out of it. Your sites should always provide contextual clues to allow users to know which site they’re in even if they did have to bypass the main page and find themselves deep within.

·         Flexibility within your navigation system can be greatly improved by hierarchy. The current hypertextual capabilities of the web of the web permit both vertical and horizontal navigation. So we can move from top to bottom or side to side across the hierarchy such that users can get to anywhere from anywhere.

Advanced navigation systems include personalization & customization, visualization and social navigation.

·         Personalization involves tailoring web sites/pages with respect to specific user or individual needs and preferences. On the other hand, customization actually gives the user direct control over some presentation, navigation and content options. Both of these can be used to refine or supplement navigation systems.

·         Visual experiences on a site can be a major plus, but are they really necessary with every website? The IA should seriously consider the pros and cons within the environment within which they find themselves before implementing any visual effects on the site. It becomes a matter of necessity or attractiveness. Whichever precedes the other can lead to the right direction.

·         Social navigation is not yet a big mainstream practice, but is on the rise. This paradigm is based on the premise that value for the individual user can be derived by observing the actions of other users and is already covering some ground with sites such as Amazon and The New York Times whose sites create a feedback loop between design and behavior, creating flexible and adaptive navigation systems that significantly add value and advance the usability of their websites and intrantes.