August 2007
Beginner
416 pages
12h 16m
English
Content preview from Designing Web NavigationBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 4. Types of Navigation
"Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."
—Attributed to Albert Einstein
Not all navigation mechanisms on a site are equal.
Your job is to sort them out. You must determine the purpose and importance of the navigation within your site, bringing similar options together and presenting them as a cohesive unit. Of course, there are conventions to get you started—bars and tabs are commonly used for the main navigation, vertical mechanisms on the left for local navigation—but there are no set usage rules, and many variations exist.
To sort them out, try thinking like a visitor, not a designer. Take time to consider how visitors perceive the navigation mechanisms. Understanding the type of navigation a menu represents can help people predict links and reorient themselves on new pages.
But what makes a main navigation the main navigation? What makes a related link different than a local navigation? Several aspects distinguish types of navigation:
The type of content a mechanism accesses
Behavior of the navigational links and transition to the next page
The tasks and modes of seeking the mechanism supports
Visual treatment of navigational options
The position of a navigation on a page
What's more, the type of page on which a navigational menu appears greatly determines the navigation's purpose. The navigation on home pages is usually different from the navigation on product pages, for example, and visitors expect certain navigational elements to appear ...
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