Take the navigation stress test

Do you think that your site is a breeze for visitors to find their way around

Do you think that your site is a breeze for visitors to find their way around? Of course you do. However, take this test and you may find that all is not as rosy as you think…

One of the popular ways of evaluating the navigation of your site pages is a method called the Navigation Stress Test. This system has been pioneered and publicised by an IBM user experience designer called Keith Instone in 1997 (http://instone.org) and involves printing out web documents and annotating them.
By asking questions of the page and marking out its relation to the overall site, you can hopefully establish the ‘three basic concerns’:

Where am I?
What’s here?
Where can I go?

The idea is that you end up with a very visual representation of the cognitive
processing and decision making that goes through the minds of your visitors. If you find that you have real trouble identifying things easily then you might want to ask how those experiencing your site for the first time will get on.
We’ve had a go using the instructions printed below and Annie Mac’s Radio 1 page www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/mashup for the sake of illustration. Check out our results and have a go yourself!

WHAT TO DO
Choose a low-level page from your (or any other) site. Print the page, preferably in black and white. Assume you are seeing the page for the first time and follow the list below

QUESTIONS AND INSTRUCTIONS:
What is the chosen page about? > Draw rectangle around title of page
What site is this? > Circle site name
What are the major sections of this site? > Label with ‘X’
What major section is the page in? > Draw a triangle around
What is 1 level up from here? > Label with a ‘U’
How do I get to the home page of the site? > Label with an ‘H’
How do I get to the top of this section of the site? > Label with a ‘T’
What does each group of links represent? (Circle and mark as follows:)
D = More details, sub-pages
N = Nearby pages, same section as current page
S = Pages on same site, not as near
O = Off-site pages
How might you get here from the site home page? (indicate page flow).