Jeffrey Veen

The Psychology of Navigation

I've often referred to the links in Web pages as windows -- little glimpses out to other destinations. And, as users scan a page while hunting for their next click, they use these windows to make their decisions. The more context you can offer them, I've often said, the more effective their browsing will be. This encompasses everything about the link: the text or image within the anchor, the URL in the status window, the presentation of the link (is it in a row of obvious global navigation or buried with in a paragraph?), and much, much more. My partner, Jesse, has also been thinking about this, and has crafted an essay for Digital Web Magazine collecting some new thoughts.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 19 December 2002 at 12:48 PM. It was filed under Information Architecture. | View blog reactions