“Navigation is the most significant element in web design. Since web-layouts don’t have any physical representation a user can stick to, consistent navigation menu is one of the few design elements which provide users with some sense of orientation and guide them through the site. Users should be able to rely on it which is why designers shouldn’t mess around with it.” (Smashing Magazine)

“A new browser study revealed a shift in how we interact with the Web. University of Hamburg researchers found the Web moving from static hypertext information to dynamic interactive services. Clickstream heatmaps and web page statistics show rapid interaction over smaller areas of the screen. The authors recommend that web developers create concise, flexible, and fast loading web pages to keep pace with the speed of web navigation.” (WebSiteOptimization) – courtesy of guuui

“The primary purpose of web navigation is to help people to move forward. It is not to tell them where they have been, or where they could have gone.” (Gerry McGovern)

“I’m in the lucky minority of people that have actually designed successful browsers, or parts of them, for any length of time, and with Firefox and Opera in the headlines, and the art of browser design becomes important again, I thought I’d write down some of what I know. Its been years since I was a program manager on the Internet Explorer project, but I’ve maintained interests in the design of navigation and searching systems of all kinds: what follows is a rough summary of what I’ve learned.” (Scott Berkun) – courtesy of lawrence lee

“Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on links or hit the back button to get there.” (Henrik Olsen – guuui)

“Data, content and functionality operate in a similar manner in the digital experience. There is a set of data, content, and functionality that exists in a binary form on some hard drive, yet how one interacts with it is through some expression of an interface.” (Andrei Herasimchuk – Design by Fire)

“Navigation design isn’t just about finding things — it imbues meaning based on the contexts it provides.” (Peter Merholz)

Presentation by Victor Lombardi at the Information Architecture Summit 2004 (Noise Between Stations)

“In my nine years of working on the Web’s user experience, a lot has changed online – but one thing that hasn’t changed much is the way that users navigate websites.” (Mark Hurst – Good Experience)

“Recent studies have shown that while the use of breadcrumb trails to navigate a website can be helpful, few users choose to utilize this method of navigation. This study investigates the effects of ‘mere exposure’ and training on breadcrumb usage. Findings indicate that brief training on the benefits of breadcrumb usage resulted in more efficient search behavior.” (Spring S. Hull – SURL 6.1) – courtesy of lucdesk

“What this gives me is some justification, I think, for getting content owners to focus on labelling in order to give links in the body of the page excellent scent, and it allows me to feel more comfortable exploring ways to modify the local navigation and even remove it in some cases. It definitely helps to have this kind of data when exploring UI modifications with your team. I expect to track this data in the coming months to see how changes in the navigation scheme impact use.” (Michael Angeles)

“(…) to make electronically delivered documents far easier and more practical and faster to work with, by expanding beyond the “help topics” design paradigm. This site covers information structuring; rapid navigation; and designing Help, Web pages, and documents.” (About hypertext navigation) – courtesy of victor lombardi

“Breadcrumb users were found to use the Back button less often than users who did not use the breadcrumb; however, no differences were found in the efficiency measures of total pages visited, navigation bar clicks, embedded link clicks, or time to complete the search tasks.” (Bonnie Lida Rogers and Barbara Chaparro – SURL 5.2) – courtesy of webword

“Navigation is only one segment of a Web site’s information architecture, but it is the most visible segment to the end user.” (Jeffrey Linwood – Builder.com)

“The usability of two Web page layouts was directly compared: one with the main site navigation menu on the left of the page, and one with the main site navigation menu on the right. Sixty-four participants were divided equally into two groups and assigned to either the left- or the right-hand navigation test condition. Using a stopwatch, the time to complete each of five tasks was measured. The hypothesis that the left-hand navigation would perform significantly faster than the right-hand navigation was not supported. Instead, there was no significant difference in completion times between the two test conditions. This research questions the current leading Web design thought that the main navigation menu should be left justified” (James Kalbach and Tim Bosenick – Journal of Digital Information 4.1)

“Navigation is the section of the page that controls what appears in this content area. The beauty of this is that the page content is malleable. The architecture is not, and should represent a strong, extensible foundation that will last at least ten years. It’s like building out floors in an office building. You can change the functionality of the floors as needed without changing the structure of the building.” (Indi Young – Adaptive Path)

“A short time ago David Danielson posted a handy list of web navigation resources, and then it disappeared from the Internet. He was nice enough to send it to me, and I’m posting my own version with some of his links and some of my own (…)” (Victor Lombardi)

Introduction: Web Navigation – Special Editors: Ben Shneiderman, Jonathan Lazar, Melody Ivory (IT & Society)