April 22, 2003

Keeping Site Navigation Under Control

"Indi Young":http://www.adaptivepath.com/team/indi.php, from "Adapative Path":http://www.adaptivepath.com, has written an excellent essay on keeping site navigation levels under control. Site Navigation is the strucutre of the site, and generally consists of the header, footer and/or sidebar in your site. There is a difference between global navigation, primary navigation, utility navigation (I call these site tools), and footer navigation. Two prime principles espoused in this most excellent article are Keep Navigation to Three Levels and Don't Make Product Names a Part of Navigation
Because navigation elements take up permanent real estate on your pages, deep navigation will become too unwieldy to display in a restricted navigation area. ... Users will form a mental map of the site structure as they move within the navigation. Research from the middle of last century shows us that people can remember about three or four "chunks" in their short-term memory.
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Tagged As Info Architecture, Strategy, Usability

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