Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience

James Kalbach, Aaron Gustafson9780596528102, 0596528108

Thoroughly rewritten for today’s web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various “rich” interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it’s about the ways people find information, and how you guide them.Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user’s needs? You’ll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book: * Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design * Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior * Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility * Helps you understand the problem you’re trying to solve before you set out to design * Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation * Explores “information scent” and “information shape” * Explains “persuasive” architecture and other design concepts * Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications * Includes an entire chapter on tagging”