Site navigation

[sdosemagen]

Point: Jeff Team: Shannon, Sara Importance: Medium

• Overall navigation design- does it work
• basic navigational structure of website- can we change that- is there a better basic paradigm of navigation
• many different possible improvements
• site map
• overall design
• explore other types of navigation?
• list of navigational aggrevances- different types of users- pose as question to interface designers- testing different headers and sidebars
• Float proposals for different ones- user interface could be done empirically

[jywarren]

I added arrows next to header items (Places, Tools) which have drop-down lists. I hope this makes it more clear that the header item is itself a link (i heard some confusion on that point) and makes tablet browsing easier as it doesn't rely on hover events.

[jywarren]

Here I think we should look closely at Google Analytics and see what interfaces are heavily used or not at all used. We could do a survey too -- personally i'd like an easier way to get to a given map in the Archive. Maybe just an auto-complete search box could solve lots of these issues.

[jywarren]

Chris F posted some comments in this Balsamiq mockup related to header design: https://publiclaboratory.mybalsamiq.com/projects/userdashboards/Dashboard

The big button bar: A suggested order of importance to some hypothetical website visitor… News: This is hard unless it’s curated, but maybe a combined feed from the discussion forum, Twitter, weekly newsletter, upcoming events, and human generated research notes. One way to curate it is to tie it to a (new?) Twitter feed, and charge the staff with tweeting all worthy news with appropriate links. Can these links be automatically displayed as clickable thumbnails of the page? Events: All upcoming events and maybe links to reports of recent events. Instructions about adding, questioning, or RSVPing to events. Research Notes: Notes segregated by generator (human, MapKnitter, Spectral Workbench, jewelry vendors) and easily sorted or searched by date, tool, place, author, project. Clear instructions about posting new notes vs. commenting on notes, vs. posting on the forum, vs. adding to wikis. Tools: These are mostly static pages but have to be kept up to date as tools develop. Clear links to tool wikis and instructions about how to add or contribute to them vs. reporting on progress in research notes. Places: I don’t know how to make this more than it is – mini sites of interest mainly to people in those places. Archive: This is an archive of mostly MapKnitter maps. Will it be an archive of anything else? Other maps? Stitched, blended, annotated maps? Data? Photos? About: Your brochure.

Ideally, the Dashboard tabs should include one to Post to forum. Making that link might be tough.