Navigation Design

Have you ever found yourself on a website that feels like a maze? Where you just can't seem to find your way to the content you're looking for, so you give up and move on to a competitor instead? Even if the business' product has nothing to do with creating websites, you assume that they won't pay attention to detail and do good work for you.

You certainly don't want that to happen to your business. Good navigation can go a long way towards making a good impression on your clients. Navigation Design by the Neilsen Norman Group helps professionals learn how to make easy-to-navigate sites so that they never have to worry about losing customers over poor web design.

This course teaches the fundamentals of good web navigation. It starts with an overview of the purpose of navigation, where the instructors will help you understand why it's essential to have a clear navigation structure. They will also cover details of navigation design, such as orientation, route selection, and arrival.

It's very common for clients to request beautiful and impressive web designs, but often those designs aren't actually easy for people to navigate. This class teaches professionals how to explain the importance of user-friendly navigation to people who are more concerned with beauty than function.

Once there is an understanding of the overview of navigation design, the class dives into its role within the user experience system. The instructors explain the different components of navigation, as well as when to use them. By the end, students understand the most common attributes of effective navigation.

This class will also cover navigation as a global system – covering placement, orientation, and behavior. It will explain the different required factors for bringing together a functioning system, such as tables, static links, roll-overs, flyouts, and cascades. Participants learn when to use horizontal and when to use vertical orientation, and why.

This day-long interactive lecture will cover many other aspects of navigation, including parent, child, and sibling pages and mini navigation between them. There are important variations in navigation for e-commerce, and those will be covered in this course as well. Related links and tag clouds are also essential aspects of navigation and discovery.

This course also discusses search - an integral part of how many people navigate websites. Instead of using links, many site visitors simple type what they're looking for into the search bar. This course teaches its participants how to integrate search and browse. Finally, the instructors explain how to create a site structure so that everything hangs together solidly. Students learn about sitemaps, breadcrumbs, pagination, and spatial navigation.

By the end of this course, students can create a clear and simple navigation system for any website and site visitors will never get lost.