Assignment 7 – Navigation Systems
Objectives
To provide automated and intelligent navigation to your web system
Understand the importance of good navigation system to web site effectiveness
Assignment
Having an easy ability for you users to navigate your web site/system is one of the keys to success in creating any large system. Many navigation systems exist (bread crumb, menu, site map, etc…). You must (1) decide of the type or types of navigation your system will use, (2) implement this navigation, and (3) test this navigation.
Your choices of navigation systems (you can have multiple);
– Menu based navigation (single level or multilevel, navigation bar)
– Bread crumb navigation
– Site map navigation
– Inline links
For this assignment – for your site – for all the pages you create – (1) implement an easy to use navigation system that also provides easy ability to update. (2) On the bulletin board put links to your site and explain why you selected this. Reason can also include availability of good plug-in systems. In your posts include references to information about the usability of navigation systems to defend your selections. A good site is http://www.usability.gov/
You will submit a link to your application with the implemented navigation along with the strategy.
Information
A Good user interface (UI) or User Experience (UX) is typically the difference between success or failure for your site. You will go into much more depth into these topics in the class CEN3722 Human Computer Interaction but you will have a lot more that you need to do here to ensure that the UX is a positive one. One thing that frustrates users is simply not being able to find or go to where they want on a large and complicated site. Navigation is important. It is also important that a user understands and can anticipate what will happen when they click on something or select a navigation option.
This is not meant to be a challenging assignment technically – but more to lead you to thinking about your site design, advantages of different implementations and how the user should drive the design choices.
Estimated Completion Time
You should spend at least 3-4 hours researching and looking at site strategies for implementation of your site navigation
Supporting Lectures
There are no specific lectures for this. I do recommend that you work through another MVC project as practice, the Music Store Application where you will learn about Partial Views. Menus can be implemented as partial views. The specific instructions on building the menu system are the last step – https://www.asp.net/mvc/overview/older-versions/mvc-music-store/mvc-music-store-part-10
This entire tutorial is available starting at https://www.asp.net/mvc/overview/older-versions/mvc-music-store/mvc-music-store-part-1 . It is written for MVC3 – but it is quite easy to handle in any version of MVC. It takes about 3-4 hours to complete the tutorial which will also help you completely beef up your MVC skills.
Questions and Answers
External Resources
Types of navigation systems for web sites – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_navigation
Usability.gov is an excellent resource for understanding the importance of site design and the user experience – http://www.usability.gov/
Simple best practices in site navigation – https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/website-navigation/
Understanding the importance of navigation on web site – http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/main-website-navigation-ht