Alertbox: Site map usability (fwd)

excerpted from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020106.html (fwd'd below)

 "We have often predicted that Internet Explorer version 8 will be the
 first decent Web browser. One feature request for version 8 is better
 navigation support by offering a visualization feature that would pull
 the site map out of the website and make it a standardized browser element."

So Mozilla kinda does this for the currently viewed page, using HTML LINK
elements in the HEAD of a document. But it only has the current document's
point of view, not access to the rest of the sitemap. Having it (and IE,
Opera...) consume RDF sitemap for navigation support would be pretty cool.

Has anyone spent any time looking at this? (I'd expect folk working on web
browsers for mobile phones, PDAs etc would find this of interest too...)

My scribbles on this topic (including Moz screenshot and some sample data
from www.bized.ac.uk) are mostly gathered in
http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/08/bized-meta/

Dan


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 14:26:51 -0600
From: Jakob Nielsen <alertbox@nngroup.com>
Reply-To: bounce-alertbox-1596872@laser.sparklist.com
To: Alertbox Announcement List <alertbox@laser.sparklist.com>
Subject: Alertbox: Site map usability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 6 is now online at:
  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020106.html

Summary:
Current site maps are inadequate at communicating multiple levels of the
site's information architecture. Usability tests found that users often
overlook site maps or can't find them. Complex site maps didn't work: a
map should be a map and not a navigational challenge of its own.

Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 16:44:10 UTC