Useful book for making you understand navigation design

books:


	• Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience James Kalbach O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2007 - 456 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Foundations for a new specialization

This is an excellent new book about web navigation because: (1) includes a very selective and efficient review about the foundation of the topic; (2) explains the main principles about the discipline and the techniques relates with the web navigation design and, (3) the book itself has an excellent design, with a lot of illustrations, captures, pictures, etc. In my humble opinion is an essential book for anybody interested in quality web design.

Useful book for making you understand navigation design

This book's really targeted to make you think about how to make your site's visitors best able to easily and repeatedly find content you deem important. You won't find bits on CSS, Javascript, or Ajax. Instead you'll find out things such as selecting appropriate navigation menu styles for given contexts, information architectures, the impact of tagging systems, and some of the complexities around search.

The book's beautifully laid out with lots of shots of real websites scattered across full color pages to help illustrate important points.

The first chapters are pretty academic and can be pretty dry, but they provide good information on content/information architecture. The rest of the book is an easier read, but that doesn't mean you should skip the first chapters. Lots of good sidebars call out specific topics -- accessibility is a hot topic throughout the book and gets a lot of sidebar treatment.

The book's full of gems such as how you should consider workflows in navigation (think shopping cart systems, e.g.), or the differences between "lingo" and vocabularies. There are also a bunch of great references to other works, and each chapter has some nice exercises which are actually pertinent and helpful in making the reader more aware of that chapter's points.

I was surprised that globalization/localization didn't get more treatment in the book, but there are quite a few example screenshots and discussions around international websites.

Overall it's a very interesting, thought-provoking book.

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Good summary on web navigation

This is an exhaustive book that summarizes a lot of aspects of website navigation. I recommend it mostly to information architects of bigger websites. It is more detailed on navigation than the Polar Bear book (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web), though I still find that book the absolute handbook on the topic.

The book consists of three parts:
The first part is about common user behaviours, types of navigation systems, labeling, etc. This part summarizes a lot of things you probably know but maybe it is not as structured in your head as the author makes it.

In the second part, the author presents a framework on how to design web navigation. From the evaluation to the actual visual layout of the navigation system, all relevant phases are discussed with examples.

The third part is about special navigation: search, social tagging and RIAs. A good intro to the topics with some interface patterns.

The book has a lot of screenshots that are quite current. Some chapters are quite self-explaining (ie. what are tag clouds, or what types of pages there are) but that is normal for a book that aims to be a baedeker for all things related to the topic.

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Mr. Kalbach thanks for a great read.

As an application developer, I found the book extremely useful as it provides a vocabulary which one can use to discuss the User Experience on one's web site/application. The many examples (screen-shots) of web sites from around the world are extremely helpful as they demonstrate the design concepts discussed in the book.

The sections regarding Accessibility and Internationalization are indispensable. These two topics are critical for a successful web site or application.

I would have liked to see more content regarding web applications as used in the enterprise like Client Relationship Management. These applications aren't necessarily Rich Web Application (Web 2.0) as covered in chapter 13.

The full color print lends itself to the many screen-shots and diagrams, but the use of font type and color may be excessive (light gray on light blue doesn't really work, page 24).

The only upset I have is the page width; your eyes scan the text in an uncomfortable manner causing "eye fatigue".

All in all - this book is a must.

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These books aren't written in Dutch

Superb overview of all the aspects of navigationdesign. Well structured with superb colour pictures of recent websites.

Only thing what I missed was the steve krugish humour. Not a real surprise because the author comes from Germany.

I am a webeditor and I'm going to use the knowledge from this book for the improvement of the navigation of my site.

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