Navigation Station

Ease of navigation is extremely important to a site. If users have to click through a winding path of links to go from one page to another, they're probably going to hate the website. The goal should be to require as few clicks as possible, as demonstrated by the "three clicks rule". Looking at Google.com, three clicks will in fact get you anywhere on the main website. The navigation is super clean and easy to follow, which might contribute to Google's crazy popularity.

One idea that I really liked was using sticky notes to lay out the information and navigation. I've actually heard someone in Michigan Tech's web team talk about doing this in focus groups when she collects feedback about new sites. I think this is a great way to organize the information because you can treat it like a puzzle and fit all of the information pieces together in a way that forms that most coherent narrative. Another important idea was to incorporate multiple ways of getting around a site. Not everyone goes through information in the same way, so offering more than one way to navigate a page can help diverse users access the information more easily.

Above all, the readings seem to emphasize laying out the site before actually sitting down to code. Doing research on what works and what doesn't is pretty much the most important part of the whole designing process. Someone can design the most beautiful website ever, but if users can't easily get around or if the information isn't put together in a way that makes sense, the website is essentially useless. One final thing that was surprising to me was that URIs don't really change, yet many of us see the web as so dynamic. Though the web is always changing, the underlying structure remains pretty much stable. It seems like the URI is this steady, universal language that all of the other coding lingos refer back to, which isn't what I would expect given that the web is so decentralized.