Designing Web Navigation

QUESTIONS

1. You'd like to buy a new CD in your favorite style of music. Nothing in particular, you just want the latest; something new. What is the difference between navigating an online music site, such as iTunes, and walking through the actual shop? Describe your experiences in the shop and on the web site as if you were:

   1. Someone shopping there for the first time.

   2. A regular visitor.

   3. What's the first thing you do in each situation? What's the last thing? How to you find what you are looking for?

2. You need a new computer desk for your home office. Use Ikea.com (or the Ikea site in your country) to find such a desk. First, do a search with the site search function, then browse to find a desk.

   1. What are the differences in how you locate the desk?

   2. What problems did you encounter with each method of access?

   3. Which was more helpful and why?

3. The World Wide Web is a type of hypertext system. Hypertext refers to the linking of one document to another, in this case, web pages. But the Web wasn't the first hypertext system to be imagined or developed. In 1945, an important American scientist during the Second World War, Vannevar Bush, envisioned a system that could link two documents.^[8] With the hypothetical memex machine, as he dubbed it, people could create "trails" of related information. Later, Ted Nelson—who coined the term "hyperlink"—developed a system called Project Xanadu, considered the original hypertext system (although it took 30 years to complete and was not successful). Other attempts ...