Web navigation design focuses on creating the type of experience a user will have while moving through your site

Un-finding & Web Navigation

In the offline world we can utilize physical cues and established conventions for context and constraint. For instance, a traditional product catalog can be searched through established conventions like an index, a table of contents, page numbers, and browsed through section headers and physical cues (the beginning, the back, etc.). This combination enables us to move between searching and browsing fluidly and to restart easily. Online, however, we are missing the cues and conventions that guide us in the real world. Instead the constraints we employ are always presented to us as flat interface elements.

When the Web was young this wasn’t much of an issue. Search and browse were separated out of technical necessity and users either traversed a category hierarchy or entered a search term. Their choices were clear. Today (thanks to technological advances) searching and browsing are joined at the hip. A search can become a browse (through filtering) as fast as a browse can become a search (through search constraints). For example, you might elect to browse a Web site by selecting a link to the “Music” category. Your item list (of music products) can then be searched via a constraint like “Search for_____ within Music”). Now your browse is a search.

While these types of “finding” systems empower users they can also make the act of locating a product complex. Martijn van Welie’s Web Design patterns detail 21 “common design solutions” for navigating and 10 for searching. Many finding flows utilize several of these solutions simultaneously and, as a result, may create problems for users.

Ina complex finding system, it can be unclear which constraint or filter is in place. Is it the keyword, I just searched on? Or the category I am in? Or perhaps the navigation tab I originally browsed to? Or a combination? Which constraints are giving me the results I’m seeing?

In the Shopping.com example above- what is constraining me? The active tab (home & garden), my search term (stove), the search constraint (kitchen ranges), the breadcrumb (large appliances)? How are they all related?

Sometimes the process of un-finding or backing out of a browse or search path is how relevant items are actually found. But many finding systems don’t allow users to easily relax constraints. Instead users have to start over or worse yet end up needlessly limited to a constraint unknown to them (resulting in few or no matches to their query).

The CDW example above provides a consistent means to remove search filters (keywords) as well as browsing filters (attributes such as categories). This not only indicates what factors are responsible for the current item list, but also allows users to undo portions of their finding process easily.

In our information-saturated cyber lives, a day may come when the process of un-finding (navigating out from specific results) becomes as crucial as finding (navigating to specific results).

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Web Navigation Design

Where information design has to do with content and structure, navigation design focuses on creating the type of experience a user will have while moving through your site. Navigation design objectives include: helping a user remain oriented within the site (bread crumbs), providing persistent and consistent methods of navigation, specifying the overall user experience.

Using your site map, you can begin to see the many levels of navigation and interaction necessary to get people to the information they seek. Notice how site levels are outlined on your site map and how they correspond to the Raytheon standard navigation elements.

Standard Navigation Elements

Navigation systems on Raytheon web sites should reflect the structure of their site maps. Site maps are developed to organize the content of a proposed site, so that visitors encounter a clear path of information. For more help on developing site maps, visit the Information Design section of this site.

Once a site map is finalized, the navigation may be designed. Since site maps are often organized hierarchically, from broadest messages to most specific, the navigation system designed for Raytheon Company web sites is designed to help visitors travel among broad topic areas, and down into details of each topic.

The Raytheon web navigation system consists of three primary elements: global utility navigation, tab navigation and column navigation. These three elements occupy specific places on Raytheon web pages, as shown in this diagram:

The global utility navigation includes enterprise-wide navigation options for standardized information or applications such as searches and directory listings.

The tab navigation provides links to the highest level (level-1) groupings of content within a site structure. These options should consist of the broadest categories or the areas of critical interest to visitors. Tab navigation is used to display the breadth of options on an entire site

The column navigation provides links to the level-2 sections specifically related to the active level-1 (tab) section, as well as the hierarchical level 3 thru 6 links specific to each level-2 section. Column navigation is used to display the depth of options specific to the active level-1 (tab) section.

Detailed specifications and additional guidelines for creation and use of navigation elements is available in the Web Template Guide available in the downloads section of this site.

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Web navigation tools boost Arrow Electronics sales

With the help of stronger search and navigation tools, Arrow Electronics is making sales that are 400 percent bigger than those it's used to closing.

The Global Information Business (GIB) division of distributor Arrow Electronics sells information to users who need to research, design with, buy or manage electronic components. GIB amasses hoards of product data - today its databases contain information about 23 million components, each with between 25 and 50 attributes - which it makes available to users on a subscription basis.

In the past, the search capabilities of GIB's browser-based component selection application, called Global Explorer, were limited. Users could search by part number, but little else, says Chris Henry, vice president and general manager of GIB. This meant GIB's services were most suited to users who had an idea of what they were looking for and how to describe the item - such as those in purchasing and materials management roles, Henry says.

Its services weren't very useful to design engineers, who are in product-research mode. "The challenge for us was trying to add value for design engineers who are in the process of doing research and they don't necessarily know a part number," Henry says. "We started out with part-number searches and learned fairly quickly that wasn't appropriate for that group."

To increase its sales range, GIB last spring deployed search and navigation tools from software maker Endeca Technologies Inc.

With Endeca's InFront software, users can find components by searching for a full or partial part number, keyword or manufacturer, or by using Endeca's guided search features to prioritize component parameters. For example, an engineer looking for memory could begin by defining the type of memory needed, then move on to select density, voltage and performance parameters.

The versatility of search options means GIB can sell its services to more users along the corporate supply chain, Henry says. Instead of selling a company an individual license, GIB is now selling multi-seat subscription packages which are five to 15 times larger than single-user license deals, he says.

Part of the reason GIB chose Endeca's software is its "guided navigation" features. As a search progresses, Endeca InFront eliminates irrelevant information and returns only valid product choices. This way, users can't choose options for components that don't exist, Henry says.

"That's a frustration with a lot of the search engines today," Henry says. "Engineers go through a long search stream, only to not get an answer, and they don't know where in the stream they made a call that caused them to get knocked off the path."

GIB worked with Endeca to customize the software maker's existing "find similar" feature, which allows users to find alternative product sources if their original choice is not available, for example. In GIB's deployment, the Endeca software adds the ability to specify parameter ranges, such as "between 1.8 to 4.5 volts," Henry says.

The two companies also worked to develop a "master list" feature that's new to Endeca InFront. With it, GIB corporate customers can upload into a customized master list all the electronics components that they have already approved and limit their employees' searching to only those components that are on the company's master list.

The master list feature allows GIB customers to keep their component options at a manageable level and encourages design engineers to reuse devices that are already deployed at their companies, Henry says.

"It's expensive if a company keeps introducing brand-new parts when it doesn't have to," Henry says. "They don't get the economies of scale if they keep designing with different parts."

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From zzstructures to mSpaces: New ways to compare Web navigation tools

Surfing the Web could become a much more effective experience thanks to new approaches endorsed at this year’s ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Hypertext Conference.

In its current state, the commonly used link in a Web page allows people to search the Web and to use hyperlinks to jump from one page to another. The down side is that when people click links, pages load on top of one another and unless they can recall the route taken, it is easy to lose much of the content of the search along the way.

For their comparison of new models, called Hyperstructures, for representing information on the Web, dr monica schraefel from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and Michael Mc Guffin from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto received an ACM SigWeb Special Research Distinction, Awarded for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts.

Their paper describes hyperstructures including zzstructures (developed by ECS Visiting Professor Ted Nelson) and mSpaces (developed by schraefel), in terms of graph theory. Hyperstructures allow hypertext information like the Web to be presented in ways that show not just the links between pages, but the multiple relationships between the information in the pages.

For instance, one view of a group of musicians might show how they are all from a particular country; another might show how they all create a particular style of music, or all had their first performance before they were six. The formalizing of hyperstructures into well-known graph-theoretic terms allowed the authors to make specific comparisons between zzstructures and mSpaces in particular. No such comparison, either formally or conceptually, between these hyperstructure approaches had been previously described.

The aim of creating both the formal descriptions and the resulting comparisons was to provide a clear means for designers to compare the attributes of these hyperstructures so that they could decide which approaches best suited their information design requirements.

dr schraefel comments: 'By considering new models for representing information which go beyond generic organizing structures like the lists we see from a Google search, we can consider equally new approaches for representing hypermedia information spaces that let us explore the relationships among the information, rather than just the data in a page. Relationships within information let us develop different kinds of knowledge about something. We hope that our comparisons of how we can represent these relationships will act as the basis for designers to be able to make informed design decisions about the attributes they might want to use from these structures if they want to design richer information spaces than what the Web currently allows.'

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