You can have all kinds of great attractions on your site, but if your visitors don’t know how to get to them, they’ll just collect dust on the server. Worse yet, if visitors find your site’s navigation confusing or convoluted, they’ll simply give up and head off to explore the rest of the Web, never to return. So, good navigation design is an essential ingredient for any successful Web site.
good intro to creating different types of nav bars for a site, though the visual (graphics, fonts, etc) he recommends in the article and points to are not well-designed.
interesting though: researching this, i’m finding a lot of immediate hits on this subject (website navigation schemes, website nav bars, etc) are to pages from 2000, 2002. some advocating using frames, some presenting using image maps as a viable possibility. both of which should be avoided when at all possible, which is most of the time.
On a website, “navigation” doesn’t mean just links. Navigation is, like most elements of a website, about communicating with the user. Good navigation tells a story, and good stories have a beginning, middle, and end.
A List Apart: Human-to-Human Design:
As broadband becomes prevalent, web designers have increasingly begun to combine visual design with interaction and motion. Their role has become less that of a designer and more that of a director of experiences… An experience director must pull together content, formulate an interactive approach and style, and orchestrate the creative elements in which to propel the story. The web designers of the future may even be required to write a treatment, melding the design process with that of film direction.
i really like that quote. when designing a website (which i’m doing now, am finally getting to redesign my non-profits much-in-need-of-help website), i try to look at it as an interactive experience. that i’m introducing a user to all the content on the site, and i am effectively serving as their tour guide. literally taking their hand, pointing in one direction and saying, “there you’re going to find all the info you’d want to look for about our company’s history” and point in another direction and say “and over there are photos you can look at.”
A List Apart – Calling All Designers: Learn to Write!:
Let’s look at everybody’s favorite example of Doing it Right: Flickr. Ask a bunch of people what they think of their experience at Flickr and they’ll use words like “fun” and “friendly” to describe it.
Why?…
I say: It’s the writing. The friendliness comes from good old fashioned text. When you visit the site, it welcomes you with a random language. Hola! Salut! Shalom! When you log in, the button says “Get in there” instead of “Submit.” When you upload a photo, join a group, add a contact…all of the associated text is open, encouraging, happy, and excited. And it has a significant impact on the overall user experience.
i’m experiencing that a lot at my current nonprofit job. i’m having to do a lot of writing, for both print and the web. a couple months ago the policy person had delivered to me a huge document listing out all the content she wanted on her section of the site. i took it home with me (all right, to a bar in the castro), read thru it and… it needed a LOT of help. grammatical errors, inconsistent voice, switching from 2nd person to 3rd person, excessively formal writing… i marked it up horribly, and went to her the next day letting her know that i’d be rewriting most all of it, to help it fit more in the website. and she fought with me a little on this, saying that (she deals with a lot of legal documents, wading thru huge libraries on national policy) that’s what our users are going to want, huge abstruse highly technical documents. and here i am, the quiet designer, always advocating that things be simple, conversational and lucid. basically, so that a 3rd grader could understand. bright pictures, icons that make sense, taking huge paragraphs of intractable text and breaking them down into conversational bullet points. i’ll take her word for it that there does need to be densely technical sections on her site’s realm, but the main pages i reserve rights over. why? because the content, the writing is part of the design.
A List Apart: Home Page Goals:
Goal 1: Answer the question, “What is this place?”
This is, and always will be, the number-one job of any home page. If you ignore this goal, you’ll leave new visitors in the dark.
The first thing a new visitor does when they get to an unfamiliar site is ask that question. If the site does not do a good job of answering it within a few seconds, the user will feel dumb, leave, and never come back. After all, what would you do if you met someone and they made you feel like an idiot? Would you want to hang out with them again?
This is all about making a good first impression.
Don’t be afraid to use good old fashioned text to say: “This is who we are, and this is what we’re about.” Then link to a more verbose about page or tour. That way, the people who need that help have a place to go to find it. And make sure the text you use is excited and positive—and makes the reader feel important.
How Do I Make My Web Site Navigation Easy To Use and Intuitive?. easy basic introductory info about setting up navigation for a web site.
There are as many website navigation methods as Hobbes has whiskers, but some are more tried and true. Regardless what method you use, the important thing is to make it reliable and to stick with it throughout your site. Let’s review some of the proven methods.
The 10 Worst Web Sites to Navigate in 2006. you can ALWAYS learn from the mistakes of others. and i’d completely forgotten the phrase “mystery meat navigation”, and it cracked me up to hear the term again:
Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined and popularized by author and usability analyst Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces (especially in websites) in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are. The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them.
Flanders adopted the epithet mystery meat because, like the unidentifiable processed meat products historically served in many American public school cafeterias, MMN is unfathomable to the casual observer. Before conceiving the term mystery meat navigation, Flanders temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation, a phrase named for the Saturn Corporation, whose website formerly served as a high-profile example of this web usability problem.
The Worst Non/Not-for-Profit Web Sites of 2007. i can always count on web pages that suck to make me laugh. man, navigating thru these sites, they’re so bad i was rolling in my cube.
