The Design of Sites: Pattern Group B — Creating a Navigation Framework
Pattern Group B of The Design of Sites — nine patterns (B1-B9) for letting customers move through a site in whatever way suits how they arrived and what they’re after, since customers rarely all enter at the homepage or want the same thing.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Multiple Ways to Navigate (B1) — the intention/impulse motivator framework and the five navigation styles (search, browse, next-step, relate, promote) that serve them, plus where each belongs on the page.
- Browsable Content (B2) — organizing content for browsing rather than searching, the information scent concept (coined at Xerox PARC), and finding-your-way-back cues.
- Content Organization Schemes (B3-B7, combined into one page) — hierarchical, task-based, alphabetical, chronological, and popularity-based organization, presented in the book as a menu of interchangeable/combinable answers to one question rather than five separate problems.
- Category Pages (B8) — keeping a site’s distinct sections recognizably part of one whole, via consistent layout and a clear “you’ve arrived” signal.
- SITE ACCESSIBILITY (B9) — additional accessibility guidance; see Accessibility.