[Sigia-l] Navigation in Wireframes

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

> > I'm about to embark upon another large set of wireframes 
> > and have been toying with the idea of making each global 
> > navigation module (top nav, side nav, bottom nav) a distinct
> > wireframe  (on a separate page)

This is easy in Visio: You can do this using the Document Stencil (in
Visio 2002, simply go to File/Stencils/Document Stencil to enable the
Document Stencil pane). Simply build your nav on a page, then select the
whole nav, then  drag the nav into the Document Stencil area. Then drag
it back out from the Document Stencil area onto every page where you
want to use it. Any time you want to change the nav globally, simply
double click the icon in the Document Stencil area to edit it.

> I wouldn't be able to show 
> the state of the navigation on every page (e.g. the page 
> title called out in the navigation via bold, etc.).

I've always considered this to be a good example of how, in the words of
Emerson, "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds". In
almost every project I've ever worked on, nobody needed that kind of
information to be displayed in wireframes. The designers and coders who
are the customers of the wireframes might only require a simple
explanation of the nav on the first page ("The nav shall highlight the
tab for the section the user is currently in"). If they're smart,
they'll understand the implications of that specification on all of the
other pages.

There are exceptions, of course. For example, a "Search Results" page
may not fit under any particular global nav tab, and perhaps you may
need to make a note of this on the wireframe for that page. Another
example is that maybe you want to use the wireframes for paper protytype
testing, in which case indicating "active tabs" may be useful. 

All I'm saying is that this kind of level of detail can potentially be a
waste of time, and that we IAs should always think before we knock
ourselves out over a level of specification that maybe nobody actually
needs.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
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