Trend Alert? The Navigation/Promotion Hybrid

Lately I’ve noticed some sites cropping up that display promotional elements in their navigation UI. Check out the nav hover states on The Atlantic.com:

(You can’t see it in that image but there is also a sponsorship graphic & link—gasp!—to the right of the editorial promotions.)

Similarly, Food2 promotes a handful of videos alongside a more conventional list of nav links.

And on the Craftsman site, graphic promotions appear below a straight-forward index of links.

At first glace, this goes against everything we’re taught about good user interface design. Navigation should be like the exit signs along the highway, not the advertising billboards. But I must admit that these examples don’t bother me—in fact, they look kind of juicy. Maybe it’s all about the context. In the case of Food2, I’m not very familiar with their programming, so I was happy to see some interesting suggestions crop up unexpectedly.

Of course, three examples does not exactly qualify as a trend per se. But it does seem to reflect some broader changes in search-related behavior that designers are beginning to explore. Cheryl, one of my co-designers here at Tierra, is currently reading Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, which talks about how the boundaries between searching, browsing and discovering are being blurred. Or so Cheryl says. Rumor has it she will be posting a review of the book here soon, so stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 11:09 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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