Week 3: Prototyping

Navigation

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Key Terms & Concepts

Primary Navigation: Typically the same as global navigation, “primary navigation” refers to navigation that allows users to move between pages at the top rank of the hierarchy.
Secondary Navigation: Navigation that allows users to move between pages at the second rank of the hierarchy. Note that tertiary navigation (3rd-level) occurs often on large sites.
Ambient Findability: A concept termed by Peter Morville that suggests that good navigation design results in a user’s ability to find anything from anywhere within a site.
Cognitive Proximity: Pieces of content that are similar to each other in the user’s mind. This term likens a user’s mental model to a physical space where items can be near each other, which can be convenience for designing navigation systems.
Internal link density: The quantity of links between pages within a site. Sites with higher link density have more links between its own pages.
Mystery Meat Navigation: Navigation items that require interaction from the user in order to indicate their destination.
“Deep” site: A site that has many levels in its hierarchy.
“Broad” site: A site that has many items in a single rank in its hierarchy, typically at the highest level. Sites with this type of structure are also referred to as “flat.”
Miller’s Rule of Seven: The psychological principle that humans can hold seven bits of information simultaneously in memory. It has been used to rationalize against navigation structures with more than 5–9 items at the top level.