Taking a look at Google’s persistent navigation

Google is at it again, iterating on their products – and I think they’re on to something good here by standardizing and improving the behavior and interactions of their persistent navigation across all of their products.

But let’s define “persistent navigation” before we get too far into this post. I define persistent navigation as navigation that accessible from anywhere across a domain – regardless of the action that a visitor/consumer is undertaking.

Iin some websites, due to the way they behave their persistent navigation can include their Main Navigation (see http://www.cnn.com/) and in others, their Main Navigation is not considered persistent since it adapts itself to the section of the site the visitor is on (see http://www.massgeneral.org vs http://massgeneral.org/cancer/).

This is what Google’s persistent navigation looked like just a few days ago (I’m going to say 3 days ago, just to set a timeline):

And this is their current rollout

Subtle and jumping into the “web 2.0″ visual style. How so?

• They’ve done away with underlines, instead opting for a visual element (blue bar) on top and spanning the length of the container for each item in their persistent navigation
• the traditional “link blue” has been substituted with a pastel like blue and
• there’s a nice gradient behind their persistent navigation instead of a harsh line separating it from the content

As I said, subtle changes – but they seem a step in the right direction by being more sophisticated and finessed than their previous execution.

What do you think?

Personas: A sort of getting started guide

Personas, in the marketing sense, tend to be full of fluff, and are simply another deliverable to which to bill to the client. Really.

But, in reality, personas are much more than that, they are a real design tool – they allow you to understand your audience, from their needs to their behaviors to their consumption of content. Personas are, in essence, a design artifact. Personas can be really powerful, if done right.

I’ve worked on numerous projects and crafted personas. However, I’ve never designed personas on my own, so I feel like I have holes that I rely on others to fill or to help move through them. I’ve been doing some research (read asked on Twitter for help) and got a list of books and articles that deal with personas and their design/development.

Books

• A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making by Carolyn Chandler, Russ Unger
• The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (Interactive Technologies) by John Pruitt
• The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web by Steve Mulder
• Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Daniel M. Brown

Articles

• Audience Segmentation Models by Steve Baty
• User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models by Steve Baty
• Personas and the Role of Design Documentation (How it’s less about deliverables, and more about design) by Andrew Hinton

I’m sure that there are tons of other resources out there, as well as examples, if you feel like sharing, please do so in the comments.

Thanks to: @russu, @semanticwill, @mojoguzzi, @jodiemoule and @docbaty for their replies.