Navigation Features

05Mar08

Three websites that I think offer interesting navigation features Nike, Converse, and Juicy Couture.  What I liked about nike.com is very simply that it moves.  In the center of the page there are videos leading to the particular part of the website of the content that they feature.  For instance, when you first open the page, a video about Nike women is in the center and you can click the video to lead you to more information about women and Nike.   Then next to this are other videos that are grayed out, and when clicked on they can lead to other points of the website.  I like this because I have never really seen this in another website, and it is a way to navigate a website while at the same time offering more content on the homepage without making it cluttered.  Something that I didn’t like about the navigation of the website is that it does not make the shopping feature of the site very prominent.  I think that this is one of the main things that someone who visit the site would be looking for, so I would add this feature to the video reels in the center, or make the shopping link more eye catching. 

Another website that visited that had interesting navigation was converse.com.  I thought what they did was interesting because they focused their homepage navigation on shopping (which I think is the main reason why people would be visiting the site).  The shopping navigation is on the left side of the site, and is set up as a circle.  You can select the center of the circle to “shop” or around the circle you can select specifically what you are looking for.  As you roll over certain parts of the circle they move and change color.  I liked it because the only flash features on the website is for the most important part, and most people will interact with it because it’s what most people are looking for in the site.  Something I didn’t like about it was that it is in an awkward part of the page.  It’s off to the side and is smaller than what is shown in the center.  I think that they should make it movie on its own or more centered to catch more attention, and make the user look or search less.  However, this is one example of a navigation system that I thought was visually interesting and instantly usable.  This is because as you used it, it became more visually appealing and grabbed my attention. 

The last site that looked at was juicycouture.com.  I liked the navigation of this site because it listed the links neatly on the side of the page, but included a flash image with the navigation also.  The flash part included moving images of examples of what each link would lead to.  It’s the only part of the website that moves, and it shows the navigation of the site in a different way for someone who wants to just browse around the site.  Something that I didn’t like was that it was very basic.  It just was a picture reel of the one product for each link to certain categories.  Something that I would like better would have been video or more pictures for each link. 

Some things that I saw in the websites that I looked at that I would want to use in my own website would be a combination of what I saw in the Juicy Couture and the Nike websites.  Use of pictures in reel, with a combination of linking I think would be interesting for my own website.  In the case of the Nike site, I don’t think video would effective for the content that my website would be offering.  However, I liked the scrolling reel of the images.  Possibly navigation for the featured or reviewed websites could use these types of techniques because there would be images associated with these parts of the website. 

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