Site Navigation Stress test

Recently read an article on the Stress test of navigation , feel very helpful, so want to put some of the methods inside recommend to everyone. When a user arrives at a page, they often experience the following problems:

• Where am I?
• What is it?
• Where can I go?

How to test the navigation ability of this page?

1. Randomly select a page from your site;
2. Print this page in black and white, and remove the page header's browser address bar and the following copyright and Company Information section;
3. Pretend that you are entering this site for the first time and try to answer the following questions (see the list below);
4. Write down what you think and answer on a piece of paper;

Let other members of your team or friends familiar with your site also do the same experiment with you, everyone like skydiving into the site of any page, and then put the answer on the paper, you can see what the site is you agree, what you disagree with.

List of issues:

Stress test	Record on paper
What does this page write about?	Draw a square in the title of the page or write clearly on the paper;
What kind of website is this?	Use the name of the site in circles, or write your own on the paper;
What is the main section of this website?	Identify with X;
What is the main section of this page?	To mark with a triangle around X;
How do I get to the homepage of this website?	with h logo;
How can I get to the top of the website?	T to identify;
What does each group of links represent?	Circle the main link on the page and write down the logo; D: Used to identify more, detailed introduction and this section of the sub-page, etc.; N: Other adjacent pages in the same forum; S: On the same site but not adjacent to the page; O: Leave the page of this website;
How do you get to this page by the way?	Please write your path to reach this page, choose 1> Select 2> 3 ...

The author provides some examples for you to refer to :

• example1-plain.gif (click to view)
• example1-markup.gif (click to view)
• example1.ppt(click to download)

Original link: http://instone.org/navstress, the above article is my translation of the original, may be some unfamiliar with the word, please forgive!

I have also used this simple and practical method to test the previous I modified Taobao gift channel, found some problems:

1. The Gift channel has no "back to Top" link, which is the part to be identified as "T"; I read many domestic websites, including some big foreign websites including Yahoo,ebay and so on, there is no such a "back to the top" link, but Amazon has such a link, This is worth learning from other websites, when users browse some pages that are too long, to provide a convenient way for users to return to the top of the global navigation position, so that users restart his site roaming.
2. The Gift Channel page URL is too long, really is not the average person can remember "http://www.taobao.com/vertical/present/index.php", Why not Call "http://gift.taobao.com"? This is convenient for users to remember this channel, but also convenient for users in the future do not need to pass too many "choose 1> choose 2> ..." way to enter the site, but directly enter the "http://gift.taobao.com" into the site;

Recommended that you also use the above methods to test their own website, to see their own every page in the end what navigation problems! Hope to be able to improve the website of everyone.

Add :

I feel like this kind of test, it's best to work with a few people and then click on the problem list to find the appropriate part, because each person to a page to find these parts of the ability and time is different, so as a designer can see their own design problems, such as: "is not the link to the home page?" "Is there no link to the top?" "Is the main part of the page not obvious enough to find?" Is it easy to find different types of links and differentiate between them? Wait