Nielsen Full day training course offered at Usability Week Dallas
Information Architecture: Day 2 (navigation)
Navigation components and menu styles
Usable navigation allows users to seamlessly move throughout your website or application. To create an effective and extensible navigation system, you must understand the possible navigation components and styles that support both your business needs and your users’ tasks and capabilities.
In this seminar, we’ll explore a broad range of specific navigation components and menu styles and give you the tools you need to make informed navigation design decisions.
Benefits
- Learn why some navigation designs work and others don’t
- Evaluate navigation systems using our checklist
- Review a framework that will guide you through important decisions as you design your navigation
Topics covered
- Purpose of navigation
- Navigation issues observed in testing
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Navigation design guidelines
- Defining navigation
- Choosing navigation components
- Testing navigation
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Navigation system components
- Global and local navigation
- Breadcrumbs
- Utility navigation
- Related links and quick links
- Pagination
- Tag clouds and spatial navigation
- Site maps
- Faceted search
- Social filters
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Navigation patterns and behavior
- Hyperlinks
- Filmstrips and accordions
- Drop-down menus, fly-out menus, and cascading menus
- Mega menus and floating menus
Format
This course is an interactive lecture. You will learn to apply and practice new principles and techniques through in-depth exercises, while staying grounded in the research that supports them. Individually, and in groups, you will evaluate and redesign a website’s existing navigation system.
The course also includes:
- Findings from our own usability studies, including eyetracking
- Videos from user testing showing people's behavior in response to a design
- Screenshots of designs that work and don’t work
- Opportunities to ask questions and get answers
Companion Course
Information Architecture: Day 1 (structure) is a companion course to Information Architecture: Day 2 (navigation). Each course can be taken independently. Information Architecture: Day 1 (structure) covers:
- Why information architecture (IA) is important for your website or application, and how a good IA can save your company time and money during and after development
- Essential logic and concepts to build a useful, usable, and extensible information architecture
- Methods for designing, documenting, and evaluating your IA
Instructor
Kathryn Whitenton
Kathryn Whitenton is a User Experience Specialist with the Nielsen Norman Group. She works with clients to evaluate the usability and information architecture of websites in a variety of industries including technology, telecommunications, and media, as well as corporate intranets. She has conducted usability research, eyetracking user research, and studies of users on mobile devices in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Her user studies have included general audiences as well as specific consumer types, business segments, children, and seniors. Read more about Kathryn
Kathryn Whitenton is a User Experience Specialist with the Nielsen Norman Group. She works with clients to evaluate the usability and information architecture of websites in a variety of industries including technology, telecommunications, and media, as well as corporate intranets. She has conducted usability research, eyetracking user research, and studies of users on mobile devices in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Her user studies have included general audiences as well as specific consumer types, business segments, children, and seniors. Read more about Kathryn