Designing for the Scent of Information

Apparently a must-read if you work on sites with large amounts of information:

Designing for the Scent of Information
The essentials every designer needs to know about how users navigate through large web sites
By Jared M. Spool, Christine Perfetti and David Brittan

The users coming to your site all have one thing in common: their animal instinct. When a user wants to find something on your site, they are on the hunt. Just like a fox in a forest, they’ll be most successful when they pick up a strong scent.

Does your site’s content have the strongest scent it can? Does your site’s design enhance your information’s scent or obscure it? If you don’t know how the scent of information affects your users, chances are your site prevents them from finding your most important content.

In Designing for the Scent of Information, you’ll learn the design secrets of successful sites, such as CNN.com, Fidelity.com, BBC.co.uk and Amazon.com. You’ll see how users approach a site, how they decide where to click, and how certain designs are better at getting users to the information they seek.

(via Usability in the News and MNnteractive)