Creating User Pathways

Take a close look at this book. Look at the front cover. Find any teasers that get you
to open the book? Look at the back cover—any information there to help you as
a reader to get to the information you actually want? Flip through the book; what
catches your eye? Now examine the Table of Contents, and check out the Index.
All of these aspects of a technically-oriented book are whats referred to as the flip
factor. Books are architected in very specific way to provide you, the reader, with
various paths you can take to get to information.
In terms of a Web sites “flip factor, auditing, wireframing, and prototyping all
lead us to the shaping of our sites architecture and, ultimately, the sites usability
and content design. Were creating the interface between a sites technical backend
and its welcoming front-end. If a book, which is a mostly linear medium, can
benefit from user pathways, so can aWeb site. Whats more, because different types
of people use navigation schemes and site entry points in different ways, creating
a variety of pathways to information is a necessity.

The experienced Web designer and developer will right away notice the crossover
between IA and usability at this point in the process. How users will navigate your
site is a major part of usability and user interface design (see Chapter 4). Despite
the crossover in application, putting the implementation of user pathways into the
IA process lays down the opportunity for usability testing to begin very early in
the process.
To figure out how a user might trailblaze his or her way through your site, you must
figure out the scenario: Which user is attempting to achieve what? For example, a
buyer goes to the Meyer Shoe site with the goal of buying a pair of womensshoes.
How the buyer gets to the right place to take that action is another matter. She
may go to the site via its home page and follow the options from that point. Or, as
a returning customer, she may have the womens shoes main page bookmarked.
Another scenario could be that she originally bought a pair of running shoes for
her ten-year-old nephew, and has the childrens section bookmarked. If she starts
on the main childrens shoe page, how does she get to womens shoes? Its your
job to help the buyer by first figuring out who is visiting your site and under what
range of potential circumstances.