Navigation Systems

When determining a type of navigation system for a website there are a number of factors to take into consideration (in order of priority):

  1. Political interests within the organization
  2. Features and functionality approved by client
  3. Concept boards already created and viewed by client
  4. Personas
  5. Other sites with similar content

Starting the process, there are usually only two ways to organize the content:

  1. Top down – Broad to specific
  2. Bottom up – Specific to broad

Perhaps a card-sorting exercise might be beneficial to determine where users organically associate content. Let’s say there are four buckets for information to live:

  • Contact Information
  • Main Content
  • News
  • Help

Let’s breakdown each bucket a bit further:

CONTACT INFORMATION

  1. How is the contact information organized?
  2. Is there an immediate need by the user?
  3. How will users use the content? (bookmark, send to friend)

Can it be organized by:

  • Location
  • Name
  • Specialty
  • Department
  • Popularity
  • Path to end-result

MAIN CONTENT

  1. What does the main content consist of? (i.e. information, definitions, promotional text, guides, images, videos, web-based tools, etc)
  2. Is the main content temporal-based?
  3. How will users use the content? (bookmark, send to friend, fill out form)

Can it be organized by:

  • Time
  • Popularity
  • Topic
  • Path to end-result

NEWS

  1. What types of news is there? (i.e. news from outside sources, news from within like newsletters, articles, promotional, etc)
  2. Can users subscribe to get the latest news?
  3. How will users use the content? (bookmark, send to friend, fill out form)

Can it be organized by:

  • Time
  • Popularity
  • Topic
  • Importance (promotional needs)
  • Type
  • Author

HELP

  1. What do users need help with?
  2. Is there an immediate need?
  3. How will users use the content? (bookmark, send to friend, fill out form)

Can it be organized by:

  • Popularity
  • Time
  • Topic
  • Path to end-result

Of all the ways to organize the content, the one that is common to all sections is popularity. Of course, this is looking at the content from a very general level. If we prioritize the organization principles based on commonality it would look like this:

  1. Popularity
  2. Time
  3. Topic
  4. Path to end-result

Can we use these organizing principles to tackle the content? Could this be a new way of looking at the content other than just the typical Top-down, Bottom-up approaches? Is there a way to get access to the data at this level?