Designing Web Navigation

SUMMARY

Before beginning to design navigation, you must understand its individual components. These mechanisms are the basic building blocks for navigation systems. If web navigation were a story, mechanisms would be the sentences and paragraphs that comprise it. In the end, a blend of mechanisms comes together to form the overall construction of your site's navigation.

Each of the mechanisms you choose has a different role within the overall navigation scheme. Step navigation, paging, and breadcrumbs are a few simple examples of linear navigation mechanisms that move forward or backward, step by step. Other mechanisms show many details of an information structure at once, such as a tree navigation, site map, directory, or A–Z indexes. These are good for providing an overview to many pages at once.

Typically, however, web navigation is made up of menus, tabs, and bars. More advanced navigation mechanisms, such as star trees, visual thesauri, and clustering displays, visualize navigation spatially. These are not common mechanisms and tend to be used only in special situations in which they complement other navigation mechanisms. Finally, you must also consider that web browsers have built-in features such as Back and Forward buttons, history, and URLs, which affect web navigation.

Chapter 4, provides more context for when and how mechanisms should appear in a site. One may be the primary navigation to access the main categories of the site, for instance. Another might provide access ...