Navigation Architecture - II

Even though cascading drop-down-menus are an adequate representation of a hierarchical structure, they are awkward to navigate, especially if navigation occurs often, because by their very nature, drop down menus are not designed to stay visible. Thus, users found themselves hovering over the same path over and over again to get where they need to go, unlike a tree where the structure is displayed at all times allowing a user to go directly to the desired node in the tree without having to expand and collapse each and every level in the desired path. For example, if a user selects “Vacation” from the third level in the path “Company-Careers-Benefits-Vacation”, and then wishes to view “Insurance”, then the user will have to travel all over again through the same path “Company-Careers-Benefits” to get to “Insurance” because those drop-down-menus disappear when the user selected “Vacation” the first time around. Furthermore, drop-down-menus in a browser are notorious for annoying users because they are often hard to catch - all it takes is a tiny bit of jerking the focus of the mouse away from the drop down menu for all the drop-down-menus to disappear, and the user would have to start all over again.

As sown below, the ideal navigation system that websites ought to have should combine number of different paradigms and views including tree, accordion, thumbnails, drop-down-menus, wall, and wheels. In addition, an ideal navigation system should take advantage of the web, its connectivity, and its capability of collecting the wisdom of crowds for the purpose of providing suggestions and shortcuts such as:

􀂃 Most popular webpages in a website based on number of unique visitors and number of visits.

􀂃 Highest rated webpages in a website.

􀂃 Webpages similar to or complementary to the current webpage recommended by the publisher or owner of the website. For example, if a user is viewing a description of a product, the publisher could recommend to also visiting the demonstration, presentation, articles, brochures, and white papers related to the product. Thus, the user will instantly have access to everything available about the product in one concise place.

􀂃 List of webpages bookmarked by a user. If a user has the habit of accessing some specific pages, gathering those specific pages in one place can save the user a lot of navigation.
􀂃 List of links created by a user within a specific page. For example, if a page is quite long, a user can simply highlight the paragraph titles and create links for a quick and easy access to certain parts of the webpage.
􀂃 History of webpages visited listed in reverse chronological order starting with the most recently visited.