December 11, 2003, 12:39 AM ET
An interesting navigation idea
I recently had the pleasure of meeting two visiting online journalists from Sweden's Sydsvenskan. While discussing the Swedish online media landscape, one of them, Andreas, introduced me to Aftonbladet, a popular newspaper site.
What's notable about Aftonbladet is its unusual navigation scheme: The site's home page content, a complete index of the day's news, is repeated nearly in full at the bottom of individual story pages. (See this example story page.) Hence, as Andreas demonstrated for me, reading the news is a matter of clicking the top headline, reading its story, scrolling down that article page, clicking the second headline, and so forth. There are a few exceptions -- some story pages display only the section index, not the home page -- but, for the most part, the Back button is rarely used.
At first, I thought this was an awfully inelegant and inefficient example of duplication, but navigating it seemed natural to Andreas; he seemed to enjoy it. Maybe it's not as bad of an idea as my instincts suspected.
