P R O J E C T 3 // mood board crit

Upon the completion of the group critique last Friday, my team members agreed that my "utilitarian" board best supported the connotation. During the its construction, I asked myself what objects or spaces were specifically designed to be useful rather than attractive. The first thing that came to my mind was closet and kitchen space. They are designed to store and access a variety of objects with ease through organization. 

The elements that best supported the audience were found in the "utilitarian" and "nomadic" boards. Web users tend to navigate through sites quickly in a "skimming" manner moving from one page to the next, very similar to the nature of nomads. Like nomads, it is important to know where you are going but also where you came from. At artifact I feel is successful in doing this is airline route maps. 

The grid-like structure used in California Closets has informed my thinking in regards to the navigational structure of my site. 

Obviously, consistency seems to be very important in regards to navigation. When you go to a new page, you need to be able to go back, go somewhere else, and you need those options to occur in the same place from page to page. However, I think my tertiary level pages can be a place where variance and interchangability can occur. Rather than this page being the same every time, perhaps the layout and type of information can change according to the term you have accessed. For example, not all pages will have images, the lengths of definitions will vary, some will have links, some won't, some will have articles, others won't, etc. This is why the 3rd level pages need to have some level of variance. 

I want my navigation to be more like a road map and less like driving instructions. It should inform you of everywhere you can go, not restrict you to a certain destination. With this thinking, I want users to move freely through the site, always knowing where they are going and where they came from. 

The airline boarding passes and route maps seems to provide a strong and appropriate conceptual and formal approach.