4. Navigation

114 Menus and Information Architecture   Global Navigation Consistent, Persistent, and Simple Navigation Subpar Subnavigation Vanishing Navigation How Information Architecture Can Alienate Users Branding and Marketing in Menus Confuses People Utility Navigation 142 Navigational Elements   Links and Headings Buttons Breadcrumbs Search Front-End

Menus and links are the crux of the Web and hypertext media. Designing links to look like links, and menus to look like menus, is relatively easy today on the Web. But organizing and naming them is one of the most difficult and time-consuming challenges for Web designers. In this chapter, we discuss what attracts users in positive and negative ways as they attempt to traverse Web sites. We also provide advice for making navigational items visible and explicable.

Understanding people’s needs and improving a product to better meet them were central design concepts long before the Web came along. But it’s important for designers not to get so caught up in adding dazzling supplementary features that they lose sight of the basic purpose of a device.

Consider the telephone. In the old days, callers just had to pick up the receiver on a wall-mounted phone, and an operator would ask to whom she could connect them. Now that was service. But it was also costly, it was error prone, and it forced introverts to talk to people. Later versions of the telephone allowed people to call just a few numbers with the press of a single button. Rotary-dial phones enabled limitless calling, although they also required people to remember a lot of numbers or carry a phone book. Push-button speed dial made things a lot faster, and so on.

Now handheld phones can be so complicated that people often don’t know how to make a simple call on them. A phone that taunts you—now that’s not a successful design. Let’s see that our Web designs don’t do the same.