* Publisher: O’Reilly
* Number Of Pages: 264
* Publication Date: 1998-09-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1565923510
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781565923515

Product Description:

Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience offers the first in depth look at designing web site navigation. Author Jennifer Fleming offers design strategies to help you uncover solutions that work for your site and audience.

Acclaimed Web design author Lynda Weinman says in the foreword to this book: "Kudos to Fleming for her excellent research, approachable tone and generosity of information. If you’re looking for help in giving your site’s visitors a more positive experience than they get today, this book is an excellent place to start. It provides ideas and direction, not preachy rules that apply to someone else’s site."

The first half of the book suggests goals and processes for developing workable navigation schemes. Topics include:

* Basic concepts in navigation
* Traits of navigation that work
* User testing and user-centered design
* Site architecture
* Interface and interaction design

The second half of Web Navigation focuses on designing by purpose, with chapters on entertainment, shopping, identity, learning, information, and community sites. Through case studies and interviews, each section explains common navigation problems and presents real world solutions and advice. Designer interviews feature conversations with industry leaders such as Clement Mok, Jakob Nielsen, and Nathan Shedroff. Case studies include sites such as FAO Schwarz, National Geographic, and IBM.

The accompanying CD-ROM is more than just a handy drink coaster. It serves as a launchpad to the sites mentioned in the text, and also offers software demos and a "netography" of related Web resources. "The Web needs more books like this if it to evolve to the next level," Weinman writes. "I believe this book can help you make your site a better place, regardless of whether your purpose is community-building, commerce, education, entertainment, information, or hobby. It’s written is such an enjoyable, conversational tone that you may have trouble putting it down; I certainly did. I wholeheartedly recommend it for all Web publishers."

Amazon.com Review:

Jennifer Fleming knows that the best way to prove a point is to use a striking example. She loads Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience with quotes and screen shots that deconstruct some of the most fascinating, successful, and innovative sites devised. Fleming also recommends books within Web Navigation’s margins that cover the discussed subjects in more depth. Far from distracting, Fleming’s style allow the readers to take notes, think about what each site’s page is trying to accomplish, and refocus with the author on the topic.

This book makes it clear that there isn′t one right pattern to a successful site. In the case of National Geographic online, she sees the way the site guides and educates the user as its main attribute. For CNET, it’s the speed at which it presents well-filtered results and reviews. For Garden Escape, it’s its commitment to building a community through "simple and easily used forums" while selling supplies. From design basics to concept meetings to Web heuristics, Fleming casts a wide net without diluting her message: focus on the user’s experience. –Jennifer Buckendorff

Summary: A good primer for web navigation
Rating: 5

Whether you’re an experienced web designer, information architect, developer, or business analyst, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience, is an excellent resource.

While many of the sites that Jennifer lists in her netography have changed and evolved over time, she provides a plethora of examples that are still relevant today. Granted many of her examples are "main stream," alot of great work is being done there. It should be noted that the bibiliography is a bit dated, but again, many of the books referenced in the bibliography would still be relevant today.

Additionally, Jennifer provides lists of questions that should be asked when defining / developing site navigation structures. As a consultant, it is my opinion that that best consultants MUST know the right questions to ask. Ms. Fleming provides us with many of these questions. Having also read Rosenfeld and Morville’s: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, I believe that Ms. Fleming is a better writer (or has a better editor). Quite frankly, Morville and Rosenfeld wrote an incredibly important, seminal book, it just isn’t very well written in parts. Additionally, I feel that Ms. Fleming provides the reader with considerably more examples than can be found in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Kudos to Jennifer!

While many might consider the last six chapters of the book "fluff," I couldn’t disagree more. If you′re particularly new to designing web navigation, these chapters provide practical examples and issues to consider for specific types of web sites. Overall, I believe this is a "must read!"

Summary: well, it’s ok, and …
Rating: 3

It’s worth reading it, but you will probably think all the time &quotyes I know that, and?&quot. If this is your first book about web usability it will help you but if you wish to be enlighten think twice. I’m a graphic designer working on this field since 1996 and no example or analysis in this book surprised me at all; in fact it reaches more or less the same conclusions that anyone who visits those websites will find.

Summary: 1998 book anticipates 21st century themes
Rating: 4

Jennifer Fleming has created a lively and wide-ranging discussion of Web design practices for the turn of the century. This 250-page volume accepts the Web for what it is - a task-based mass medium reaching for its audience through the often clouded glass of the computer-based browser screen. Rather than fuss over the Web’s elusive true form (publishing medium? hyper-animated poster? PC software platform? supermarket?), Fleming simply accepts the obvious: there are all sorts of sites out there. For Fleming, tellingly, the design challenge lies not with deciding the right sort of site, and certainly not with the look of your navigation buttons. Instead, the challenge lies with adapting sites to the increasingly well-documented struggles of their audience. Fleming’s book starts with Web users, ends with Web users, and stays with them all the way through.

Jakob Nielsen, of course, has been gathering devotees to his cause of Web usability for several years. But Nielsen, rational as he always is, speaks from outside the designers’ circle. Fleming, a practicing design consultant, takes the Nielsen ideas (and others) and turns them into a full-fledged design process, a toolbox for building sites.

Among the best of Fleming’s tools is the "user profile", the half-imaginary story about a specific user arriving at a site with particular needs, desires and concerns. You can see this slice of the book excerpted at Web Review. The technique lets you think creatively about all the different frustrations of different user groups - problems with graphics, problems with information design, problems with underlying business processes.

Then there’s Fleming′s succinct yet detailed description of Digital Knowledge Assets′ "ethnographic" methods - such as asking users for stories of satisfying Web experiences, and even giving them disposable cameras to photograph what happens to them as they work.

To her user profiling, ethnographics and the like, Fleming adds a rich mix of more traditional Web project techniques - scenario planning, brainstorming, conventional usability testing and the like, all well-described. And over the top she sprinkles wisdom from scores of sources - from vintage design sources such as Edward Tufte through so-cool designers like Clement Mok and Erik Spiekermann to obscure sources such as a 1996 volume arguing that people expect computer-based media to behave "politely". Parts of Web Navigation are respectful journalism, as Fleming effectively picks the brains of the Web business’s best. These luminaries’ views broaden her book handily into a catalogue of current Web best practice.

Summary: Excellent points, but it’s all been said before
Rating: 4

This book has some very useful info in it, but I’ve seen it all before. I read this one right after reading O’Reilly’s Information Architecture and felt, at times, that I was reading the same book. The case studies of different sites (news, e-commerce, etc.) were very nice though. Most design/navigation books out there only focus on the kind of site that the author works on. That’s not very helpful if the author works for a University and you work for a news organization. This book covered that. I would still recommened "Information Architecture" over this one, but it is still worth reading through.

Summary: Excellent overview on the current state of web design
Rating: 4

This book covers a wide array of issues related to the creation of navigation schemes for web sites. Fleming discusses current strategies in site architecture, interaction design and site development (just to name a few). In addition, Fleming describes why these strategies work, how to implement them, and presents fascinating insights from the web’s leading design experts (Clement Mok, Jakob Nielsen, Nathan Shedroff, etc.).

One of the most all-encompassing books I’ve ever read on the subject, this book gives an excellent overview of what’s involved in web navigation design. It contains many truths about the problems facing web navigation and offers clear-cut approaches in a very practical manner. The book’s high-level approach is ideal for anyone interested in just an overview of web design, but it also offers an impressive list of references to further the research endeavors of readers with a more vested interest in the subject. Some of the examples and case studies will become a bit dated; however, there will always be a tremendous amount of value in this book due to the timelessness of the concepts presented in it.