Building on our Information Architecture Strategy and Specification for your Web site or other digital information product, Team Spirit defines navigation systems that support your target visitors’ wayfinding and information-seeking behaviors and tasks whose interaction sequences occur across multiple pages or screens—for example, shopping on an e-commerce site.

Navigation design comprises both the design of interactions that allow visitors to traverse pages or screens and the design of visual elements that present primary and secondary modes of navigation to visitors, as follows:

• Primary modes of navigation include
• navigation bars
• menus
• tab sets
• Secondary modes of navigation include
• breadcrumbs
• embedded links—either hypertext, image links, or buttons
• image maps
• site maps
• site indexes

Both primary and secondary modes of navigation are generally consistent across your Web site or other digital information product.

The site diagrams that Team Spirit created during information architecture evolve over time as your content developers create new content and become increasingly detailed. For our Navigation Design Specification, Team Spirit revises these site diagrams to provide an up-to-date visual representation of your Web site or product’s structure. The site diagrams show the hierarchical and key associative relationships that exist between Web pages or screens, which determine the navigational paths between them.

The Navigation Design Specification that Team Spirit produces for your Web site or other digital information product defines

• all navigation systems for your Web site or other digital information product
• the affordances that make your product’s structure visible to users, including their labeling
• user interactions and product behaviors that support wayfinding

Our Navigation Design Specification includes either wireframes or screen images that illustrate all navigation elements. Once our Navigation Design Specification undergoes one or more cycles of review and revision, Team Spirit presents an overview of the navigation systems for your Web site or other digital information product to your entire product team.