Despite the complexity of the material Kalbach deals with throughout Chapter Two, he closes it by reiterating some concrete, practical advice. Three points emerge as being of immediate importance:
Labelling is absolutely critical
Organization must be sensible
Appearance plays an important role
Less important is consistency in navigational structure. As Kalbach says,
Consistency in navigation is … important in supporting the [...]
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Tags: Designing Web Navigation
Kalbach devotes a good part of Chapter Two to discussing the emotional aspects of information retrieval and web navigation. He then discusses a schema outlined by Carol Kuhlthau of Rutgers describing the typical arc of emotional responses in web searches.
The details of the schema are to my mind uninteresting, simply because they seem to assume [...]
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Tags: affect, Designing Web Navigation, emotion
This article has got to be one of the most important and profound pieces on information design yet written. Unfortunately, it’s largely theoretical, meaning it’s not immediately obvious how to apply it to navigation solutions; furthermore, its chief point is that navigation is not strictly separable from content, meaning that there probably aren’t broad theoretical [...]
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Tags: Andrew Dillon, Designing Web Navigation, Information Genre, information shape, Misha Vaughn
In a 2000 paper in First Monday, Choo, Detlor, and Turnbull attempt to outline a schematic classification of user behaviour based on information needs.
Informationally, this schema is based on four identified kinds of information acquisition, and six user behaviours that support these modes.
Choo et al. divide modes of information acquisition into,
Undirected viewing (more or less self-explanatory: [...]
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Tags: Choo, Designing Web Navigation, Information Acquisition
Donna Maurer’s short article ‘Four Modes of Information Seeking and How To Design For Them’ is a nice, short, practical summary of how users search for information on the web – although unfortunately, the two ‘modes’ she identifies as most under-catered for and most problematic are also those she has the fewest solutions for.
In brief, Maurer’s [...]
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Tags: Designing Web Navigation, Donna Maurer
Looking over Toms’ article – admittedly written in 2001, when things looked a lot different – I’m underwhelmed. Toms nicely demonstrates that people parse documents in terms both of form and content, and that form is processed more quickly than is content. Given the speed with which people parse webpages, this is important. But Toms’ [...]
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The notions of ‘information scent’ and ‘information shape’ are in Kalbach’s view both crucial to effective web navigation.
The concept of ’scent’ is (as the term is presumably meant to convey) difficult to define concretely. Kalbach says it ‘refers to how well links and navigation match a visitor’s information need and how well they predict the [...]
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Tags: Designing Web Navigation, information scent, information shape, satisficing
In a fascinating 2003 paper, David R. Danielson of Stanford University discusses web navigation in terms of ‘transitional volatility’ – that is to say, the extent to which pages change in both navigation display and content within a site.
In Danielson’s conceptual schema, visitors navigation and orientation is the result of three factors:
Habituation to a particular [...]
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In Designing Web Navigation, Kalbach identifies six navigation ‘gotchas’ that decrease the credibility of a site:
Broad, vague categories, the meaning of which isn’t apparent to the user
Cryptic abbrevations
Poor organization of options within menus
Unexpected navigation behaviour (for instance, top-level links leading to non-HTML content)
Proof-reading errors
He also refers to co-research by a Stanford University team (notably including [...]
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Tags: Designing Web Navigation, Website Credibility, BJ Fogg
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 [...]
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Tags: Designing Web Navigation, Kalbach
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