Getting to navigation

Like we said at the beginning of the course, the term information architecture…refers to how you show visitors to your site or users of your application the…content you have and the actions they can perform.…That encompasses much more than just the menu system.…You can use it to determine how best to show your content, your site structure,…and even the terminology that you use to describe things.…In other words, it's one of the basic tools you'll use to decide how to arrange…your content or data so that people can find and use it quickly.…

So far, we've run a card sort, which tells us how users grouped tasks on our site and…the category names they use. We've created an abstract information architecture.…And we've run a reverse sort to test how well the abstract information architecture…meets with user's expectations. What these tools don't tell you though is…how to display those information categories on your site or in your application.…Within reason, you'll want your navigation menus to be as concise as possible, and as…