Intergen Interactive boasts a broad portfolio of interactive media design, proving our ability to create websites that deliver complex communication requirements to diverse audience groups.
When designing user interfaces for public websites we draw on our extensive history creating architectures and navigation systems for corporate intranets and information portals. We are equally at home designing vibrant brochureware as we are with systems interfaces for web enabled applications.
The attendant design disciplines required for each distinctive area of interaction design have cross-over benefits ensuring that our creative team are always focussed on delivering optimal user experience.
Navigation Prototyping: A disciplined approach to creativity
Over the past three years Intergen Interactive have been progressively developing and refining a user interface design methodology now known as Navigation Prototyping. The methodology grew out of a need to resolve the complex navigational and functional aspects of designing interfaces for large corporate and state sector intranets, internets and portals.
Simply put, the idea is to make visible to the client a preliminary step in the visual design process - a brand neutral rough (or scamp) of the core website structure, tools and components. It’s not a revolutionary concept, we were attracted to it as an approach when it was first discussed in international usability forums some time ago. Since then we have been applying and refining the model to the point that it has become central to our website design methodology.
The rationale behind separating resolution of the navigation model from the application of brand to the interface (look and feel), is to allow objectivity in relation to option selection and user testing. Creating a Navigation Prototype enables you to assess and test the suitability of the preferred navigation paradigm without the distraction of subjective brand application.
Our pragmatic approach to user interface design is based on one simple and fundamental fact:
“The web is a navigational system”
Satisfying diverse user requirements successfully involves recognising and exploiting the many methods of “navigating” from any point within a website at any time. The primary concern is not merely resolving the main site “channels”. Our methodology factors in all the navigation opportunities with search tools, hyperlinking, hotlinks, mapping, and breadcrumbs all leveraged.
Last year we completed a total redesign of http://www.wellingtonnz.com/ for Positively Wellington Tourism (a Microsoft Content Management Server project). Shown above are the three distinct phases of our approach, from concept to reality. The process commences with a brainstorming session focussed specifically on exploring navigational and information design requirements. From there the interface designer can produce a series of possible navigational outcomes - the Navigation Prototype. It is also possible at this early stage to conduct user focus testing as part of the decision process. Only once a navigation model has been accepted do we proceed to the traditional creative exploration of look & feel.