Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience [Paperback]

James Kalbach (Author), Aaron Gustafson (Technical Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596528108 | ISBN-13: 978-0596528102 | Publication Date: August 15, 2007 | Edition: 1st Ed.

Thoroughly rewritten for today's web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various "rich" interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it's about the ways people find information, and how you guide them.

Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user's needs? You'll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book:

• Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design
• Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior
• Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility
• Helps you understand the problem you're trying to solve before you set out to design
• Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation
• Explores "information scent" and "information shape"
• Explains "persuasive" architecture and other design concepts
• Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications
• Includes an entire chapter on tagging

While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Kalbach has a degree in library science from Rutgers University, as well as a master's in music theory and composition. He is currently a Human Factors Engineer with LexisNexis and previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish Germany. He is an active speaker and author on information architecture and usability in Germany, where he helped co-found an IA community.

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st Ed. edition (August 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596528108
• ISBN-13: 978-0596528102
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 8.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Computers & Technology > Graphic Design > Interface Design

More About the Author

James Kalbach is a human factors engineer with LexisNexis, a leading provider of legal and news information, where he develops interfaces for web-based search applications. He previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish, Germany. James holds a degree in library and information science from Rutgers University, as well as a Master's degree in music theory and composition.

James is an assistant editor with Boxes and Arrows, a leading online journal for user experience information (www.boxesandarrows.com). He also serves on the advisory board of the Information Architecture Institute and is on the organizing committee for the European Information Architecture conferences (www.euroia.org).

Music is a main creative outlet outside of work, and James plays bass in a local jazz combo in Hamburg Germany, where he lives with his wife, Nathalie, and cat, Niles. James is also a craft beer aficionado and regularly contributes ratings and stories to RateBeer.com, a leading online beer community, under the user name pivo (www.ratebeer.com).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rings True, September 18, 2007

By 

Brett Merkey (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience (Paperback)

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The title of this book does tend to focus things, doesn't it? A book totally dedicated to working out navigation challenges in Web products means that it is destined to be a one-stop keeper on your shelf. If you work in any capacity on Web front-ends, navigation is often the issue of issues, the source of stimulating and heated team discussions. This book won't end those discussions but the information in it will certainly add calm perspective to them.

_Designing Web Navigation_ seems to have it all in one place, including practice discussion at the end of each chapter and further reading recommendations. The amount of information is impressive. There is not a page without a visual aid of some sort. I certainly like having lots of screenshots of real sites with the commentary of the author.

I also like the practical knowledge of the author which informs his writing -- he emphasizes the variability of the rules in the complex contexts we Web workers tend to work in. Note, for instance, how differently he approaches Amazon's tabbed navigation from how usability guru Jakob Nielsen writes of them. Nielsen never passes up an opportunity to exclaim what is wrong wrong wrong about Amazon's tabs. Kalbach, instead, explains the motivation behind each passing stage in the evolution of those same tabs, giving the dynamic context. This rings true for those of us with daily working knowledge in constructing user interfaces.

I was a bit disappointed that the book did not have more on the specific problems of designing Web *applications* instead of conventional Web sites. However, the book is written is such a way that this is not a problem. The advice and arguments on p.236 "Don't start by designing the navigation on the home page" encapsulates quite well something I have learned working on agile development teams over the years.

I had a few problems with the readability of this book. Page numbers look like squished gnats and all paragraph sub-headings were a pretty but painful light blue. The extremely large line-height weakened the separation of paragraphs.

As I mentioned, this book is chock full of the right material that belongs on your shelf for when you need it...and you will.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Foundation Resource, September 6, 2007

By 

Susan Prosser (Gilbert, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience (Paperback)

This handsome volume will help web designers learn how to analyze their business needs and translate them into a workable navigation system for their users. Unlike some other design books, James Kalbach doesn't shove his own design principals down the reader's throat. Instead, he cites use cases and usability studies that will help readers figure out which design approach will best suit their needs.

Lots of screenshots from well-known websites, great layout and good organization make the book a pleasure to read. The book starts by explaining general principles, so even if you're new to the concept of interaction design, you'll quickly get up to speed. More advanced readers could skim the first chapters, and plunge in later, where they'll learn things like visual logic and information design. Each chapter ends with a good summary, thought-provoking questions that either reinforce or expand on the chapter's topics, and suggestions for further reading. Note: I do have one quibble with the layout. The page numbers are so small it made my eyes hurt. But everything else about the book's design is inviting and useful.

Caution, though, this is not a coding book. You won't learn how to make pop-up menus or write clean CSS. It's meant to help readers learn how to make decisions about the look and feel of a website. Even though the book is focused on web navigation, "regular" software designers will benefit, too, since so much interaction design is driven by users' expectations that all software should work like the web.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good summary on web navigation, February 10, 2008

By 

Gócza Zoltán Károly (Budapest, Hungary) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience (Paperback)

This is an exhaustive book that summarizes a lot of aspects of website navigation. I recommend it mostly to information architects of bigger websites. It is more detailed on navigation than the Polar Bear book (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web), though I still find that book the absolute handbook on the topic.

The book consists of three parts:
The first part is about common user behaviours, types of navigation systems, labeling, etc. This part summarizes a lot of things you probably know but maybe it is not as structured in your head as the author makes it.

In the second part, the author presents a framework on how to design web navigation. From the evaluation to the actual visual layout of the navigation system, all relevant phases are discussed with examples.

The third part is about special navigation: search, social tagging and RIAs. A good intro to the topics with some interface patterns.

The book has a lot of screenshots that are quite current. Some chapters are quite self-explaining (ie. what are tag clouds, or what types of pages there are) but that is normal for a book that aims to be a baedeker for all things related to the topic.