In the Spoolcast “Better Navigation for Web Apps” Jared Spool asked Hagan Rivers a couple of questions she didn’t get around to answering the attendees at the Web App summit. God I wish I had been there, but that’s beside the point.  One of the questions asked was: “How do you know what the user thinks?” Hagen answered: ask the user, watch the user, look at related software ect. Use the information from field studies to make mental models (a reference was made to Indi Young’s great book on the subject) and persona’s.  And don’t forget to make scenario’s for the respective persona’s.
On the topic of web app navigation: using hovers for opening menu’s is not a good thing (for the hard to learn) and breadcrumb navigation is really only needed (and seldom used anyway) if the rest of the navigation is not up to scratch.  I like the way Jared suggested testing “User confidence”: giving the user poker chips to express how confident he or she was they were getting it right in terms of navigating through the site.

I would love to start on a project for once the way I know I should. And I hope I get to work on a project soon that uses scenario’s or user stories instead of  only use cases with the system requirements in mind.  Maybe during the ongoing development of Digimeente…