This document discusses designing navigation for websites. It notes that users will not use a website if they cannot find their way around it. When entering a website, users usually try to find something and decide whether to search first or browse links first. The document outlines some oddities of web space like having no sense of scale, direction or location. It states the purposes of navigation are to indicate what content is available on the site, how to use the site, and build confidence in the site creators. The document then discusses web navigation conventions and elements like persistent navigation, site identification, sections and utilities.

1. Designing navigation
S.Gopinath
Department of Physical Science
Vavuniya Campus,
University of Jaffna,
Sri Lanka

2. • People won’t use your Web site if they can’t
find their way around it.
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4. When you enter a Web site
• You’re usually trying to find something.
• You decide whether to ask first or browse
first.
– “search-dominant” users
– “link-dominant” users
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6. Oddities of Web space
• No sense of scale
– Even after we’ve used a Web site extensively,
unless it’s a very small site we tend to have very
little sense of how big it is.
• No sense of direction.
– In a Web site, there’s no left and right, no up and
down. We may talk about moving up and down
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7. • No sense of location.
– In physical spaces, as we move around we
accumulate knowledge about the space.
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8. Purposes of navigation
• It tells us what’s here.
• It tells us how to use the site.
• It gives us confidence in the people who built
it.
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9. Web navigation conventions
• The conventions specify the appearance and
location of the navigation elements so we
know what to look for and where to look
when we need them.
• Putting them in a standard place lets us locate
them quickly, with a minimum of effort;
standardizing their appearance makes it easy
to distinguish them from everything else.
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11. Persistent navigation
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12. The Site ID
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13. • There are two ways to get this primacy across
in the visual hierarchy of the page:
– either make it the most prominent thing on the
page
– make it frame everything else.
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14. The Sections
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15. The Utilities
• Utilities are the links to important elements of
the site that aren’t really part of the content
hierarchy.
• These are things that either can help me use the
site (like Sign in/Register, Help, a Site Map, or a
Shopping Cart) or provide information about its
publisher (like About Us and Contact Us).
• Utilities list should be slightly less prominent than
the Sections.
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16. Utilities will vary for different types of
sites.
About Us
Archives
Checkout
Company Info
Contact Us
Customer Service
Discussion Boards
Downloads
Directory
Forums
FAQs
Help
Home
Investor Relations
How to Shop
Jobs
My _______
News
Order Tracking
Press Releases
Privacy Policy
Register
Search
Shopping Cart
Sign in
Site Map
Store Locator
Your Account
“As a rule, the persistent navigation can accommodate only four or five
Utilities—the ones users are likely to need most often.”
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