In todays session we looked at common navigation methods in groups, before coming together as a class and sharing our findings. The point of this session was to illustrate that the common navigation tools are generally used because they're in trend at the moment and functional. Our findings were as follows;
- Scroll
- Links
- Navigation bars
- Arrows
- Search bar
- Swipe
- Logo/Home button
- Sign in
- Social media feed
- Tabs
- Motion/Transition
- Touch
- Breadcrumbs (small text and links at bottom of page)
- Dropdowns (content dropdown)
- Navigation indicator
We then went onto discuss the more uncommon navigation methods;
- Zoom
- Pop up
- Eye tracker
- Body movement
- Bottom menus
- Speech
- Disappearing bars
- Dynamic content
From this we were then asked to go away and create our own navigation diagram through the art of flow diagrams, this would enable us to visually represent how visitors will navigate around our website, but also how we would link the pages together. For example the home page would have to link to every single page if you wish to access it from the home page. Below is a rough idea of the navigation from page to page on my website. I don't want to have a home page because I don't have much information to put on it, instead it goes straight into the latest design added and you can view each page with next and previous buttons meaning they only need to be linked together as opposed to all being linked to each other. They all get linked to the archive because they all can be viewed from this page.
We also had a brief introduction to the use of grids in websites and from the print outs we were asked to bring in we drew over what we thought was the grid.