Designing Web Navigation

SUMMARY

A site's architecture is the plan or blueprint showing how visitors will reach their goals on both the macro level of initial goals and micro level of individual actions. It also reflects how the site will encourage them to take a certain action. Referred to as persuasive architecture, your job is to align what you leaned about the business, content, and technology during Analysis with what you learned about visitors with user intelligence activities (Chapter 7). The site navigation is a key aspect of the where these two—user goals and business goals—are played out.

Architecture starts with a navigation concept, which underlies the physical structure of a site. When creating a navigation concept, you are building perhaps the single most important aspect that impacts a user's experience with your site. Keep in mind that it's hard to change a concept once a site is live, so exploring alternatives at this stage is critical. I recommended testing alternative concepts with users for early feedback. No amount of post-launch enhancements can fix an inappropriate concept.

The structure of a site represents how it's put together. Most often you'll be dealing with some kind of hierarchy. But other types of structures supplement and enhance a basic site hierarchy so that a mix of structures is usually present in any given site. It's important to note that structure and navigation are related, but not the same thing. The goal in creating navigation menus isn't to represent the structure ...