Designing Web Navigation, Continued

Tip #3: Plan Beyond the Front Door

Even on sites with truly awful navigation design, it is usually possible to get from the front door to an interior page without incident. But planning your front door is only a small fraction of your job as a navigation designer. The deeper you can plan your site's structure and navigation, the more successful your site's navigation will be. The more detailed you are in these early planning phases, the fewer unpleasant surprises your users will need to deal with later.

Most of the navigation problems users complain about don't have to do with getting from the front door to some page inside the site. They tend to relate to being stranded inside a site (what Lycos's Doren Berge calls the "roach motel effect"—users go in, but they can't get out). Typically, this happens because great care has been given to navigation design, but only in one direction (submerging, not surfacing) or only on the top level (from the front door to a secondary page, but not from a secondary page to a tertiary page). In navigation design, it's the details that count. If you are a web firm or consultant recommending a navigation approach, play it out as far as you can, down to the deepest level you can predict. Often the biggest problems are not on the top level of a site.

One method that can help is storyboarding. If you storyboard a sequence of screens to show the flow of an action, you will usually be able to see where you need to build in navigation to support "surfacing" (returning to the top), for example. Storyboarding also helps you see what will be happening on the level of the interface as you move through a site. It's more helpful than flowcharting alone, which only shows a sequence of events.

However, storyboarding can't be effective until you've taken time to structure your site, or planned the site architecture. A skilled site architect (such as Lou Rosenfeld of Argus Associates) will map a site far beyond the top level, treating the whole site as a cohesive space—not as a messy collection of pages hidden by a well-planned veneer. This "wholistic" approach to design helps you to define your space and maintain consistency, an important concept in navigation design.

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