O’Reilly just annouced the distribution of 30 titles in e-book format. Designing Web Navigation is among them. I don’t have a copy yet, but am really interesting in seenig how it looks as an e-book. Also, for reason I couldn’t install the Adobe e-book reader (Digital Editions) on my work computer. [...]

Designing Web Navigation is now available in German under the name Handbuch der Web-Navigation.  Apart from a different cover (without an O’Reilly animal) and a few updated screenshots, the content and flow of the book is the same. Thanks to Michael Gerth for his very thorough translation of the text. I was fortunate enough to be [...]

Daniela Barbosa put together The Taxonomy and Folksonomy Cookbook, which available as a free download. It’s fairly basic, but makes some really good arguments and points about taxonomies and folksonomies. The writing is direct and very accessible–more for non-professionals. But if you’re trying to put together arguments for and against taxonomies and folksonomies, she’s done a [...]

This isn’t an earth shattering observation, and you’ve probably already seen this, but I just wanted to point out a navigation technique that seems to be spreading around quite a bit. I’m calling the “split tab-dynamic menu navigation.” Basically, there is both a tab (or main navigation link) and a dynamic menu both associated with a [...]

There is an interesting study from the folks at SURL this month. See “Eye Movement Patterns on Single and Dual-Column Web Pages” by Sav Shrestha & Justin W. Owens. The focus of the study is on eye fixation patterns of 1-column versus 2-column text layouts. I’m not a huge fan of eye tracking studies, but I [...]

Subject To Change, by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens (Adaptive Paths), O’Reilly, 2008   In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger formulated their 95 theses into what became the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was then published as a book in 2000. This pointed to new world marketplace, where markets are [...]

A few months ago there was an interesting story in Smashing magazine that spotted some new trends in web navigation menus. By and large, the trends identified are seen from a visual design standpoint, including some style trends. I’ve been noticing two other navigation mechanisms and styles that seem to gaining popularity. The first is what [...]

Around 1980 Nicholas Belkin proposed a new model for understanding information seeking, called ASK: Anomalous States of Knowledge. (See Part 1 and Part 11 of this landmark article). A key tenant of this model is that information needs are difficult to precisely expressed. Seekers, sometimes even experts in a given information system, are not able [...]

Mark Nolan has a nice article in the April/May 2008 issue of the ASIST Bulletin called “Exploring Exploratory Search.” Citing an article by Gary Marchionini (”Exploratory search: From finding to understanding.), Mark points to three larger classes of behavior: Lookup, Learn, Investigate. Each has subclasses of behavior. These behaviors, however, aren’t linear. Makes sense: we can [...]