Websites can be like Alice’s rabbit hole: disorientating, no sense of time or space, quirky, and hard to find ones way out (successfully making the right choices to achieve ones goal/s.) Krug tells of the best methods of assisting one thru such a surreal, time/space-less journey: homepage as the anchor, north pole, Alamo…; “breadcrumbs” that indicate the steps one’s taken to get where they currently are, und thus how to get back if desired; markers that are obvious and not too subtle. And these are tools for the designer, first and foremost.
Chapter 6 starts in on real nuts & bolts, visual and physical strategies for reinforcing his rules on best usability/navigation. This chapter is like a suggestive users manual for web authors, and I'm appreciating his increasing use of graphics now that we have something we need to visualize. I plan to use the tabs suggestion, and have some good ideas for implementing that on my site that lacked an over-all theme, feel, and character. It means more work for me, but hopefully a better finished product, and thus less work for my users.
Also, his trunk test is definitely a good exercise in learning to read your own web compass. Getting a bearing on a site can sometimes be a blind alley with no doors. Good practice to not only find which sites work and which are difficult to navigate, but to use in designing your own sites, in the test run: Make a good map –even the designer can get lost in his own labyrinth.
3 Sites related to reading:
http://thrashermagazine.com
Too much, too busy, (too obnoxious), too long to load, too many individual Flash files, lack of good structure, easy to get lost, and no easy way to get back aside from the usual: click on the header logo. Dammit -I grew up on Trasher! Get your act together boys.
http://www.dlxsf.com
In contrast: great distribution/parent site for their many companies (all listed at the top, if you want to go to an individual company site....nice!) Delux has a great streamlined site, prominent markers, clean and easy navigation. Nuff said.
http://www.misterart.com
This one is a little content heavy on the secondary nav, but ultimately, it's pretty clean. Big obvious search box, shopping cart on the right, most important ads/sales made huge and front and center, and they make use of tabs. Good job guys. (We'll probably be using this as a model for Daniel Smith overhaul...)
3 Sites related to reading:
http://thrashermagazine.com
Too much, too busy, (too obnoxious), too long to load, too many individual Flash files, lack of good structure, easy to get lost, and no easy way to get back aside from the usual: click on the header logo. Dammit -I grew up on Trasher! Get your act together boys.
http://www.dlxsf.com
In contrast: great distribution/parent site for their many companies (all listed at the top, if you want to go to an individual company site....nice!) Delux has a great streamlined site, prominent markers, clean and easy navigation. Nuff said.
http://www.misterart.com
This one is a little content heavy on the secondary nav, but ultimately, it's pretty clean. Big obvious search box, shopping cart on the right, most important ads/sales made huge and front and center, and they make use of tabs. Good job guys. (We'll probably be using this as a model for Daniel Smith overhaul...)
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