Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications

Summary

As the first layer of the Behavior tier, the Viewing and Navigation layer contains some of the most used and most common interface mechanisms on the Web. Because many of these behaviors, navigation in particular, also apply to content-based Web sites, there is a fairly evolved set of visual and interactive conventions that should be followed. These conventions include the following:

• Goals of navigation. A navigation scheme should help users understand three things: what type of application they’re using, where else they can go, and what about the application is important.

• Navigation mechanisms. Although tabs and trees are the two most common forms of high-level navigation, they are both limited in scalability, hide choices from the ...