Beyond the Button

I've stumbled across a couple interesting navigation designs recently that have a playful feel that doesn't get in the way of their actual usability.

Hanna Werning's design portfolio uses a randomly placed map of links that is quite simple and nice. It's easy to forget that simple can often be the best approach.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia uses a common icon of the art museum, a gallery guard, to liven up the navigation in a way that I kept expecting to get annoying but actually grew to love.

OK, but fancy and fun doesn't cut it entirely when you are thinking about navigation and more broadly, interaction design. You have to consider a broader array of interactions between the visitors and your media. Over on welie.com they've built a rather complete list of all of the common ways that users interact with information on a website and the pluses and minuses of each of their applications. It's unlikely that you've invented a new method of interacting with media or information when designing an experience so this list give you a good reference for how to apply different solutions appropriately.