Posts on Navigation.
13 posts tagged "Navigation".
The search index built in three seconds. Five phases made that possible.
Pagefind took an afternoon to wire up. The navigation phases before it took a week. A search index returns what’s there — and what needed to be there first was structure.
The cheapest phase in a seven-phase plan was also the highest-leverage one
Prerequisite chips in the learning hub — three words, one arrow, no JavaScript — outperformed every other navigation phase by the only metric that matters at the chapter level: whether a reader knows what to read first. The evidence is what the other six phases cost by comparison.
Seven navigation phases. The prerequisite chips encoded the one thing the others couldn't.
The learning navigation spec ran seven phases from foundational structure to site-wide search. P5 — prerequisite chips, a static 'Read first' link at each chapter head — was the smallest implementation. It was also the highest return: every other phase encoded page structure, and P5 encoded reader intent.
Pagefind shipped last. The prerequisite chips had already closed the harder problem.
The learning hub's navigation plan ran seven phases and ended with site-wide Pagefind search. The highest-leverage phase was five: a three-word chip at each chapter head pointing to the one thing to read first. By the time search shipped, most readers who needed it no longer did.
The navigation plan shipped on Pagefind. Prerequisite chips were the higher-leverage fix.
Six phases of navigation work shipped on the learning hub in July. Pagefind — site-wide search — closed the programme. Prerequisite chips, one phase earlier, delivered more navigability per line of code by firing at orientation time rather than recovery time.