Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience [With *]

by Jennifer Fleming

"Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience" offers the first in depth look at designing web site navigation. Author Jennifer Fleming offers design strategies to help you uncover solutions that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565923510
• ISBN13: 9781565923515
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A good primer for web navigation

Whether you're an experienced web designer, information architect, developer, or business analyst, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience, is an excellent resource.While many of the sites that Jennifer lists in her netography have changed and evolved over time, she provides a plethora of examples that are still relevant today. Granted many of her examples are "main stream," alot of great work is being done there. It should be noted that the bibiliography is a bit dated, but again, many of the books referenced in the bibliography would still be relevant today.Additionally, Jennifer provides lists of questions that should be asked when defining / developing site navigation structures. As a consultant, it is my opinion that that best consultants MUST know the right questions to ask. Ms. Fleming provides us with many of these questions. Having also read Rosenfeld and Morville's: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, I believe that Ms. Fleming is a better writer (or has a better editor). Quite frankly, Morville and Rosenfeld wrote an incredibly important, seminal book, it just isn't very well written in parts. Additionally, I feel that Ms. Fleming provides the reader with considerably more examples than can be found in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Kudos to Jennifer!While many might consider the last six chapters of the book "fluff," I couldn't disagree more. If you're particularly new to designing web navigation, these chapters provide practical examples and issues to consider for specific types of web sites. Overall, I believe this is a "must read!"

Hugely valuable to me

As an independent consultant I was pretty set in my thoughts about how a web site ought to navigate, and was pretty much turning them out like flapjacks. Then, a client hit me with a navigational approach -- in fact, mandated a navigational approach -- that I implemented only with many concerns. I ordered this book, assuming I knew everything there was to know about navigation, as much as ammunition in case I had to have a showdown with the client as for personal betterment. Well, sometimes really good things happen for the wrong reasons. I am really impressed with this book, and it has already been hugely valuable to me. Interestingly, it convinced me that the client was actually correct -- that their navigation idea was spot on for their market position. Actually, the effect of the book went beyond that. It started me re-thinking some of the sites I had built in the past that I still had some control over. It made me think of things I could have done differently, and it resulted in three small projects to improve navigation on existing sites. My copy is now quite dog-eared. Pages are turned down, and sticky notes inserted throughout. There are marginal notes all over the book. I have been back to it repeatedly to use one of its greatest assets: its references. Unlike some books, this one recommends a quality source no matter who publishes it. This is a pet peeve of mine with some other publishers, who can't bear to admit that any book worth referring to could come from another imprint. Yes, many references here are to other O'Reilly books, but far more are to other publishers. A ten page "Netography". A three page bibliography. References throughout the text. The nice thing is that you can take the text and run with it, and when you hit a wall there are references that can take you the rest of the way. I was also pleased to see the demo of Dreamweaver and of Imagevise on the CD-ROM. Coincidentally I had been thinking about trying both these products, and now I will get to try before I buy. Conclusion: this is the kind of technical book you can have a relationship with.

Web designers need this book!

I wish I could buy this book in bulk and send it out to the webmasters of half the sites that are online. Sheesh. IMHO, designers just aren't thinking about how the user approaches navigation *nearly* as often as they should be ... and don't even get me started about how rarely marketers and programmers take usability into consideration (or so it seems to me).It's true that this book is just the tip of the iceberg on the navigation issue, but it's a great start. As web designers (hopefully) take some of these navigational principles to heart, I hope the author expands on these ideas in future editions.

A book to read and refer to repeatedly

Web Navigation is very well-written, with humor, plain language (it's obviously written for designers in addition to techies), lots of real-life examples, and advice from the experts in the field. We're not only getting Fleming's expertise, but Clement Mok's and Jakob Nielsen's as well (along with plenty of others). All of this advice comes from a user perspective. The book is always reminding us that the purpose of a site is to satisfy the people at home. And through the numerous examples of every type (sites for education, shopping, identity, etc), we see that the rules change depending on who you are and who your audience is, so there is no quick and easy design solution.

Not what I expected. (Better, though.)

When I first heard (six months ago) that someone was writing an entire book about web site navigation, I have to admit I was pretty jazzed. After all, web navigation is something I spend several hours a day thinking about, and there's almost nothing useful written about it. (I make my living reviewing web site designs to make sure that human beings stand a chance of being able to use them. It's a great job.) I figured this had to be just the book I was looking for: endless discussions of whether sites should be wide or deep, how many items you can fit on a navigation bar without scaring users off, whether JavaScript rollovers help or hurt, and so on. Lots of diagrams and flow charts.So I have to admit that I was more than a little bummed when it finally arrived: it just wasn't the book I was hoping for. (In the interest of full disclosure, while I was waiting I sought Jennifer out to consult on a particularly thorny project of mine. She was very helpful.) But the good news is it only took a few minutes to get over my disappointment. As soon as I started reading, I realized that what she's written is actually a much more interesting book than the one I had in mind, and one that's valuable to a lot more people. Even though the title is "Web Navigation," the subtitle ("Designing the User Experience") is what it's really about. It explains (and shows by example) how to grapple with a much more important issue than what your navigation looks like--namely: figuring out your users' goals-what they hope to accomplish at your site-and then designing an experience that meets those goals. (Hint: navigation's just a part of it.) And since it's broken down into chapters for different types of sites (like entertainment, shopping, community, and so on), you don't even have to read the whole thing--although you'll probably want to. Buy this book and Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and spend a long weekend reading both of them. You'll know what you need to know.