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):
- Political interests within the organization
- Features and functionality approved by client
- Concept boards already created and viewed by client
- Personas
- Other sites with similar content
Starting the process, there are usually only two ways to organize the content:
- Top down – Broad to specific
- 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
- How is the contact information organized?
- Is there an immediate need by the user?
- 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
- What does the main content consist of? (i.e. information, definitions, promotional text, guides, images, videos, web-based tools, etc)
- Is the main content temporal-based?
- 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
- What types of news is there? (i.e. news from outside sources, news from within like newsletters, articles, promotional, etc)
- Can users subscribe to get the latest news?
- 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
- What do users need help with?
- Is there an immediate need?
- 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:
- Popularity
- Time
- Topic
- 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?
