User Interface Engineering

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:59 — 25.3MB)

Guest Hagan Rivers answers questions about web app navigation.
Duration: 45m | 25.5 MB
Recorded: April, 2009
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
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Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite go-to people for web app design, and we recently had her host a UIE Virtual Seminar on Designing Better Navigation for Web Applications. The seminar (which is still available) was brilliant, and we asked her back to answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.

Here’s the list of the questions we discussed,

• How do you conduct your user research?
• How do you measure user confidence in the navigation?
• What are your thoughts on activating menus with a click versus “on hover”?
• What is your opinion on breadcrumbs? What about advanced breadcrumbs, like on lonelyplanet.com?
• How do you scale navigation for larger web apps or sites (circa 40,000 pages)?
• What are your thoughts on user segmentation, and navigation based on that (for example, UT’s Be A Longhorn)?
• At what point during the project do you design the global navigation?
• Are there different considerations when you’re educating users about a new process or activity?

During our discussion of the user research question, we recommended Indi Young’s Mental Models as a great book on the topic. Don’t miss her UIE Virtual Seminar on Mental Models, either.

Tune in for the meaty answers. This podcast had almost as much information as the seminar! Still have questions? Discuss them in the comments below!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Breadcrumbs, Design Process, Podcasts, SpoolCast, Web Applications . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.