[IxDA Discuss] swapping navs?

[Mark Bardsley]

Leah,

I would not recommend replacing the left nav with the product nav. Only
slightly more recommendable would be a new right nav. Instead I would
recommend an in-line nav for the product. Some sites use DHTML for a
smallish area that has 4 or 5 tabs. There are other ways to do this. Check
out Apples in-line nav for their products:

http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html

(the pages could change due to new products being revealed at Mac World)

The selected primary nav item for the page above is the Apple icon, the item
selected in the secondary nav is Hardware and within that MacBook. The
secondary nav equates I think to your left hand nav. So, to my point, there
is more nav that I am calling in-line and it is just under the image of the
MacBooks: "Intel Core 2 Duo", "iLife '06", etc.

Here's another site that uses a similar approach (Alienware):

http://tinyurl.com/fj5ov

Alienware actually gets rid of the left nav by the time you are viewing the
product.

So, my bias is for creating a navigation scheme that gives the feeling of
being directly associated with the product by being on the page itself
rather than in the far top, left, or right areas of the site.

There are probably ways of dealing with the left hand navigation issue but
without a bit more context I am not comfortable giving my advice there.

- Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Leah
Cunningham
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 8:51 AM
To: discuss
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] swapping navs?

I'm working on a site where I've maxed out the left nav by the time I
get to the product level. Each product then has its own navigation
within it. The way I see it is that my options are pretty much swapping
out the left nav for the lower level nav, having a right hand nav for
the product, or finding some sort of innovative way to do it in the
whitespace.(the navs are too long to do as whitespace tabs).  My
question is if anyone knows of any research done on whether users find
swapping out the left nav for lower level navs confusing. Also, any
other suggestions are welcome.

 

Thanks

...

Leah Cunningham
Sr. Information Architect

Sequel Studio
12 West 27th Street, 15th Floor
New York, NY 10001

212 660 7863 direct
646 935 0582 fax

www.sequelstudio.com
<file:///C:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Lcunningham\Application%20Data\Mi
crosoft\Signatures\www.sequelstudio.com> 

 

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