Your users will thank you for reading this...

books:


	• Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience James Kalbach O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2007 - 456 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Your users will thank you for reading this...

The ability to navigate a web site can make or break your user's experience. I learned far more than I thought even existed in the book Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by James Kalbach. It's obviously more than just putting a list of links down the left side of the screen...

Contents:
Part 1 - Foundations of Web Navigation: Introducing Web Navigation; Understanding Navigation; Mechanisms of Navigation; Types of Navigation; Labeling Navigation
Part 2 - A Framework for Navigation Design: Evaluation; Analysis; Architecture; Layout; Presentation
Part 3 - Navigation in Special Contexts: Navigation and Search; Navigation and Social Tagging Systems; Navigation and Rich Web Applications
References; Index

If you tend to think more like a developer than a designer, then you pretty much think that a list of navigation links are all you need. Uh, no... Kalbach has compiled a wealth of information here that spans both the theory and the practice of web navigation. Rather than just say "do this, this, and this", he starts off with the foundational theory behind how people think about getting around a web site. Once that's presented, you have the proper grounding to start looking at particular types. The chapter on navigation mechanisms lays out all the different options, such as step-type navigation, paging-type navigation, tree navigation, and more. Classifying the different types in your mind helps to figure out when you might want to consider options like tabbed navigation over breadcrumb trails. By the time you've gone through the book, there's little you haven't covered on the topic.

I also appreciated the way the book is designed. O'Reilly went with a full-color layout, which means that all the websites Kalbach uses for examples accurately reflect his points. Black and white just wouldn't cut it here. Also, the edges of the pages are color-coded by chapter, so it makes it very easy to find the particular chapter you're looking for. I always have a better feeling about a design book when the book's design is high quality. In this case, I felt very good...

This really should be on the reading list of anyone who designs websites that go more than one page deep. Not only will you design better sites, but your users will thank you.

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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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Excellent Colorful and Insightful Resource

In today's day and age where the Internet is a part of our everyday life, there has never been a time more appropriate now then to have really good navigation on your or your client's website. As sites grow more advanced and complex, it is vital to the success of your website that users are able to find what they need in a timely fashion without jumping through hoops to get there.

Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experiencehelps you lay the ground work to achieve a great user interaction experience. This full-color O'Reilly book clearly explains the full process of designing web navigation in three parts: Foundations of Web Navigation, A Framework for Navigation Design, and Navigation in Special Contexts.

In Foundations, the author writes an adequate analysis of various types of navigation systems, such as the search model, browse model, or the liquid information model to name only a few. He describes why poor navigation design will turn away users and may actually decrease the credibility of your website. Furthermore he touches on topics such as banner blindness where your users may not truly notice intentional site navigation, simply because back in their minds it looks like a vertical advertisement banner.

In Framework, Kalbach evaluates different forms of navigation for different types of sites. He talks about the need to engage your users to help determine what style will work best for your target audience. Moreover, he discusses types of technologies that may be implemented such as back-end technologies and front-end technologies like CSS and JavaScript.

James Kalbach does an excellent job describing every facet of this complex and sometimes daunting process in a very detailed yet easy to comprehend fashion. He backs up all the research he has done with references as well as providing great additional reading and other resources. The full-color diagrams and case studies of existing navigations on real-world websites prove invaluable to the reader. One small complaint I have is that for a book on designing navigation, the page numbers are quite small and difficult to glance at when you are flipping through the book. Aside from this small glitch, as it were, this book is a must have in every web developer or designer's library. Even if you consider yourself to be an expert at web page flow, you cannot go without learning a rule or two, and perhaps some great what not to dos in this book.

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Great Resource For Web Designers

'Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience' is a great resource for web designers and developers that are looking to create and/or improve web navigation for new or existing sites. Fill with ~400 pages of full color content, this book features a great layout and easiest to use color tabs for navigating this text. If you go solely off of the layout and navigation of this book, you will understand how useful and to the point the content WITHIN the book is.

Another solid effort by O'Reilly that simply cannot be missed by people in this field. Fantastic resource!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Thoroughly rewritten for today's web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various "rich" interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it's about the ways people find information, and how you guide them.

Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user's needs? You'll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book: Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility Helps you understand the problem you're trying to solve before you set out to design Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation Explores "information scent" and "information shape" Explains "persuasive" architecture and other design concepts Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications Includes an entire chapter on tagging While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action.

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