Route planning
Plan useful entry points for visitors with different levels of familiarity. Include browsing by interest as well as looking for a known item.
Browse & find
A collection can be well stocked and still be difficult to explore. This capability concerns navigation, category language, search behavior, and the signals that help a visitor orient themselves.
01 / SCOPE
Help a visitor choose a promising route.
Labels & categories
Develop names that communicate what a visitor will find. Examine overlaps, ambiguous terms, and categories that reflect internal departments rather than visitor needs.
Search & result behavior
Describe query, filtering, result ordering, and recovery from an unhelpful search. Make the relationship between a selected control and the visible result explicit.
02 / WORKING MATERIAL
What can be
made reviewable.
- A route and destination plan
- A label vocabulary
- Browse and result-page sketches
- Search-state and recovery notes
The final set of deliverables depends on the agreed brief, available content, and implementation responsibilities.
03 / ILLUSTRATIVE BRIEF
An archive that welcomes a first-time visitor.
Imagine a collection of design essays. A reader might arrive with an author in mind, a broad subject, or no particular title at all. The entry page can offer distinct paths without forcing every visitor through a search box.
A category label should help someone predict the destination. The design can expose a few representative items, show where the reader is, and provide a useful next choice when a result list is empty. These are decisions about orientation rather than the size of the collection.
Illustration only. No customer engagement or performance result is implied.04 / REVIEW QUESTIONS
What should the
material answer?
- Can a newcomer predict what a label contains?
- Does the page show which filters are active?
- Is there a useful alternative when a search returns nothing?
SCOPE BOUNDARY
A navigation plan does not create a search engine or guarantee search relevance. Indexing, ranking, content quality, and the behavior of an actual service require additional technical decisions.