Wednesday, April 30, 2008

No Gyan! Some Fun!!!

I am planning to put some goodies like wallpapers, etc. on this blog, featuring & explained some Usability, IA concepts wherever possible; whenever possible. :)

The below one is the first one in the series. Do download it.



The resolution is 1024 x 768 px. If you want this stuff in different resolution to suit your system's display resolution, do comment here or e-mail me. Thanks for your support.

Looking for navigation?

I have seen lot of websites, portals & enterprise applications in the past years; with different kinds of navigations & the way those have been placed in the design.

I have seen a few things common in most of them. This is not something new I am telling; which is already been stated several times on various forums & knowledge-based sites, but this is what I have experienced while designing information architecture & wire-frame designs for several clients.

This is a generalization, though recommended for the ease of use to the end-user; which is most important goal of an Information Architect. Below given are 2 observations for the same:



The user behavior is generally intended to find a site navigation, by starting on the top left & then using the menus places on horizontal right or vertical left (downwards).



Also, most of these sites had the search functionality, placed on the top-right corner of the web-page. Even the research has proved this technically.

Due to conventions that gets followed by the several existing sites, such things become 'kinda' thumb-rule when it comes to designing usable websites, even though it is not mandatory for anybody. I will try to put in more information on the same in the next part of this.

Do you differ with these ones or have some more serious thoughts? Please do provide your valuable comments here.