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Entries from December 16th, 2007

The Home Button

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Silly as it may seem, web page designers often seem to forget to include a link back to the home page. It’s easy to overlook.
A common convention is to put the company logo at the top left of a site and link the logo back to the home page.
While this convention is understood by many, [...]

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Does your site provide appropriate orientation cues?

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The actual terminology you use can significantly influence how well people can navigate. You must have links that clearly indicate where they lead (with effective information scent): and when people arrive at their destination, your site must provide appropriate orientation cues to indicate that the users have arrived where they expected to arrive.
Links and Labeling [...]

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Ways to present navigation to the user

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Navigation bars are so common that we simplify can’t avoid the shorthand of calling them navbars.
The navbar provides the primary mechanism for users to browse your site, and the appearance of the navbar establishes a framework for users to understand how the site is organized.
The navbar doesn’t have to be a comprehensive view of the [...]

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Website’s organization schemes

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In this section, we consider the various ways a site might be organized. The first step is to examine the nature of the information you’re dealing with.
Is it structured or unstructured? Is the information homogeneous (all pieces follow a similar pattern) or heterogeneous (no simple format works for everything)? Is the information specific and concrete [...]

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Maintaining and expanding your website

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Sites will grow and change. These changes may not even be under your control. Your site may require maintenance due to link not (links to external sites that go offline or change their addresses), server upgrades, and new browsers that are introduced without total backward compatibility.
Change involves costs and risks. If pages are added or [...]

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Bottom-up versus top-down design to developing an initial architecture

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Two broad approaches to developing an initial architecture are bottom-up and top-down design. In bottom-up design, you gather all of the intended materials and categorize them, building up to higher levels of categories.
In top-down design, you specify the top-level categories, and break each category down into smaller pieces until you’ve identified the lowest level of [...]

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The process of developing an architecture

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An architecture for your web site comes from taking all of your materials and organizing them into a structure that helps the user navigate efficiently. You’ll present this information in a site outline or diagram that is used to guide the development of the site.
You may also create detailed specifications for the content, navigation, and [...]

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How the Browser Facilitates Navigation

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A final piece in understanding how people navigate is to consider the tools the browser provides to users to enable them to navigate.
Here are examples of how browsers may support navigation. The location bar enables users to enter a domain name or extended URL to go directly to a site. People will use this to [...]

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The Primary Cost Tradeoff: Scanning versus Page Traversal

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Two major mental and time costs are involved in navigating: the cost of scanning and deciding among the range of link choices and the cost of clicking on a link and waiting for the next page to load.
When people click through to a new page, they run a risk of not finding what they need [...]

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Usability Methods

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A usability method is any technique you use to create a design from a user-centered perspective.
This starts from the outset of a project, where you begin by defining who your target audience is and then try to understand what that audience wants and how they want to work.
Two broad categories of usability methods exist: [...]

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