Navigation Components - I

Navigation is achieved by using components such as toolbars, menus, ribbons, buttons, tabs, panels, maps, accordions, trees, carousels, wheels, tables, thumbnails, hypertext, hyperlinks, and shortcuts. There are four criteria necessary to attaining rich navigation, namely:
 Providing a variety of components.
 Matching every component with the appropriate function or content.
 Matching every component with the appropriate persona.
 Making every component interactive, immersive, and pleasing.
Thus, rich navigation involves the usage of Rich Interactive Components (RIC). The richness of those components is defined through the following elements:
 Identification: items in an RIC should be easily and intuitively identifiable using recognizable icons along with legible and meaningful labels.
 Access: items in an RIC should be easily and quickly accessible from anywhere such as breadcrumbs in a website map.
 Skin: the skin of an RIC consists of basic elements such as lines, borders, background, shadows, and icons. Each of those elements has certain properties such as color, texture, gradient, layout, location, size, and style. In addition of being beautiful, the skin should be customizable to match the desired branding of a company.