Rethinking Navigation

Responsive Design has become the state-of-the-art of web design in recent years, but there is still no best practice for navigating large amounts of complex content. Users in general struggle with the abstraction of navigation labels, and on smartphones in particular, they have a hard time forming a mental model of the content and its information architecture. The solutions developed for desktop screens that combine navigation and content cannot be applied to the small screens of many mobile devices. So today, when users find a page via Google on a smartphone, they hardly have a notion about related content and the way it is organized.

How do we as information architects react to this challenge of adapting navigation in the face of the increasing atomization of content? Should we hide it, drop it, redesign it? We think it necessary to ask some fundamental questions about the functions and functioning of navigation. If we don’t want to give up on fostering context, we are in need of alternatives forms of arrangement and display.

In this talk, Andrea Rosenbusch, UX architect and partner at Zeix, will discuss many current examples and what they do or do not accomplish and present some ideas on how we should let our users navigate complex content in the near future.

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