On pages 10-11 of Designing Web Navigation, James Kalbach does a nice job of pointing out the tight interlinkage between effective navigational design and effective information access – this time in connection not with how to find information, exactly, but how to know when you’ve found it, and what it relates to.
As Kalbach puts it, navigation design implicitly answers three questions:
- where am I?
- what’s here?
- where can I go from here?
The answers to these three questions add up to information context: through navigation, users come to understand what other pages they have to view to understand the one they’re looking at, the precision (or vagueness) of the information they’re looking at, and, relatedly, when they’ve come to the end of their search and there’s no more information to see.
One conclusion to draw from this is that site structure has to be to some extent visible on the page for context to be maximally understood; another is that natural predispositions (such as the assumptions that pages nested deep in the hierarchy will be more specific and precise than those at the top) should be catered to.
Navigation offers visitors a semantic peripheral vision of a site’s content. [Kalbach, Designing Web Navigation, 13]
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