Designing Web Navigation, Continued

Tip #1: Focus on Goals & Needs

Navigation design is about predicting the actions of your site's users and building a site that will support them. In order to do this, you have to understand your audience's goals and needs.

For example, let's say you run a bookstore. Your customers will come to buy books, but if you simply set up credit card processing and call it a day, you're missing opportunities. Talk to customers and find out how they want to find and purchase books. Do they want to find books that are similar to books they like? Do they want someone to tell them what to read, or do they want to discover new titles at random? Do they want to browse by subject, reading level, or other factors? Paying attention to users' goals can open up new directions for your business, not just new paths through your site. If you're in doubt about this, spend a few minutes on Amazon.com. They're successful because they listen to customers. Luck has very little to do with it.

Another important thing to consider is that many potential customers don't make it to the checkout. What's stopping them? What's interrupting the "flow" of their purchase? Chances are, they have some sort of need that has gone unanswered.

It might be that they have concerns about security that have not been addressed. It might be that they need to search for a particular author, but your search function doesn't support that. It might be that some technology in use on the site crashes their browser. In designing navigation, you need to consider these potential roadblocks. It doesn't mean you're being negative. It means you're road-building—you're taking the time to clear potential obstacles from your visitors' paths.

Finding out about users' goals and needs means talking to the people who will be using the site. If it's an intranet, build in a discovery phase in order to spend time talking with employees about their daily activities. If it's a commercial site, talk to potential customers. Ask them to use and rate other stores. Find out what they like and don't like, and try to get at the goals behind their comments. Not even the most brilliant developer can begin a new project with all the answers. Real solutions have to be uncovered, not constructed, and talking to your audience is the fastest way to ferret them out.

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