Navigation gets a Makeover with Guidance on Guidance

"Incorporating Navigation Research Into a Design Method" was presented by Victor Lombardi at the fifth Annual ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit on 'Breaking New Ground' in Austin, Texas last month.

He started his talk with an acknowledgement of the quantity of excellent research taking place on navigation. For instance, he described work on how the shape of information helps users predict the context, ordering and grouping of elements. This enables people to navigate without reliance on the trappings of navigation like breadcrumbs.

But he said: 'Consider the challenge of displaying many different types of documents in their native shape while combining them all into one information system meant for use by different people (who may not have the same shape familiarity). Our inclination is to break documents down into components, put the components into a content management system, and output those components in a limited set of templates for display in homogeneous ways. Or simply make all information look like typical format of the medium, e.g. following web page conventions. When the documents re-emerge from this information meat grinder the native shape is lost. Balancing the efficiency of large-scale publishing with the retention of native shape is a challenge.'

He looked at evidence that contradicted the dominant argument for consistency as a navigation aid. 'The user navigates and then, perceiving a change, reorients at the destination page of a transition. The destination page is incorporated into the user's perception of the recent content. The user predicts content and navigation option changes in page-to-page transitions and then navigates again. If there is a subtle change, the reorientation is easy and the user perceives the new page as part of the current collection of pages. If the change is infrequent and/or dramatic then more reorientation is necessary, and it's harder to predict how the navigation will change next. So it's just not the page right before the change that sets expectations, the user has a subtle and complex memory of pages they've experienced. Several similar pages that lead to one big change is very disorienting. More frequent, subtle changes are easily adapted to and considered consistent with what has been experienced already.'

He argues that one should "Change navigation in subtle ways". 'Notice that I don't say, "Keep navigation changes subtle" because that includes the possibility that it not be changed at all, which may be a disadvantage to revealing connections among concepts. Changing the navigation more frequently in subtle ways better prepares users for change and better reveals connections among information.'

Lombardi then turns his attention to how it is possible to design using research guidelines effectively. He has devised his own order for moving through guidelines in the design process:
* Summarise Research
* Create Intended Experience
* Gather Content
* Navigation & Interaction Design
* Classify Information

'This allows me to focus only on the guidelines I need at a particular step in the design process. This order may not work for you, but the idea of ordering your guidelines may work for you.

'Personally, I think there is too much guessing involved in current methods, with an over-reliance on testing. Given a more systematic method, we could design with more confidence. To the paranoid among us I say we are far from the point where navigation design can be automated; there are still many decisions for which we have no research and at which designers must use their experience to improvise a solution. At the very least, this becomes a better way to use guidelines, which otherwise are hard to remember and use.

'It's common to collect the information, classify it, and turn the category and facet labels into navigation elements. If the information is classified so early in the method, the information organization determines the user's experience. If the goal is simply information seeking or usability this approach may be fine. I prefer the goal of a great product and a beneficial experience for users above mere usability, so I place classification later in my method.' This, he says, is perhaps the biggest difference between his method and how information architecture is often done.

Associated Link: Victor Lombardi's slides and notes

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