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.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience
Comment: This book provides a great overview of basic navigation concepts (such as "berry picking"), navigation artifacts (menus, tabs, bars, text links etc) and usability research done in this area (often not much, but can't blame the authors for that). There are too many (for my taste) neat but not-so-useful bullet point-type categorizations (e.g. "most navigation types fall into three primary categories: structural, associative, utility") and obvious advise such as "when relaunching or enhancing a web site, it's imperative to first determine the problems of the old one". Fortunately this is counterbalanced by a lot of examples (with screen shots). Most examples are presented from an outside point if view; I'd prefer insider explanations (may be hard to get) when taking e.g. about why Amazon.com changed their navigation scheme. The organization of the book is logical, for the most part (though I do wonder why the well-written sections on "tag clouds" and "faceted browsing" appear in the "Navigation in Special Contexts" chapter)... There is some overlap with two other O'Reilly books: "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" and "Designing Interfaces" book, but having read those two books doesn't mean you won't get anything out of this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Your users will thank you for reading this...
Comment: 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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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Colorful and Insightful Resource
Comment: 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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Customer Rating:
Summary: Bad design, light on content.
Comment: This book is shockingly below O'Reilly's usual design and quality standards. It's full of pointless little 'design'-elements, such as lines, colored backgrounds and entirely useless colored tabs down the outside of the book. The font's barely legible, and the sub- and sub-sub- and sub-sub-sub- headers are in a light blue and fairly fade into the page background. The pull quotes at the start of each chapter are light grey on light blue, etc.
The content is very breezy, seemingly written by and for the PowerPoint generation. Topics are rarely developed for more than one page. There are lists and bullet points and tables galore, but not very many cogent discussions of non-obvious navigation issues. I doubt anybody who's been working in the web development or design fields (or actually, even using the web) for the past 2 or 3 years will find any new information here.
My copy of the book is badly printed, with the darkness of the ink varying from page to page.
For a book with the subtitle "Optimizing the User Experience", you'd think they'd have put some thought into the Reader Experience.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Resource For Web Designers
Comment: '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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