Designing Web Navigation

QUESTIONS

1. Think up analogies for three of the discussed navigation mechanisms. For instance, step navigation is like turning pages in a book. What does a location breadcrumb trail resemble? A directory? A dynamic menu?

2. Analyze the various navigation mechanisms on a few pages on Amazon.com (or Amazon in your country), including a search results page. Identify all the different kinds of navigation mechanisms you find.

   1. How is each used? For what types of content is each used?

   2. What are potential problems of each?

   3. What works well? What doesn't? What don't they use that they could possibly benefit from?

   4. List at the advantages and disadvantages of the three most prevalent navigation mechanisms on Amazon.

3. Compare results paging for three popular search engines. First, do a search for a common term that produces a large results set, such as "design." Then go to the twentieth page on each.

   1. How does page numbering on the twentieth page differ?

   2. What are the rules for the display of page numbers?

   3. What is good and what is bad about each?

   4. Specify the display rules for one of the paging mechanisms in words or in a flowchart using "if" statements.

4. Other than for user-created tags, what other types of navigation could be displayed as a tag cloud? List three other ways links in a tag cloud could be ranked, other than by popularity. How might a tag cloud be used for navigation on a news site, for instance? Or on a shopping site?

5. Redesign the home page of a site you are working on or that you visit frequently with ...