Navigation

When it comes to game design, navigation is a very important feature to consider when designing the interface that the players will have to use to traverse the in-game world. A badly designed interface can have the player fumbling for some basic function at a critical moment and can be both frustrating and flow breaking. In this example we have the interface from Blizzard's Starcraft II which features a very simple interface popular with most real time strategies. As most people are right handed and will thus favor the right side as the dominant one, all of the directional and ordering controls have been placed at the right. Unit statistics are posed in the middle, and finally the overworld map at the very left which also indicates the location of the selected units in real time. All controls are easily visible at first glance, but do not impose too much on the game display up top, allowing for a fully immersive gaming experience.

Another area in which navigation is important is in the world of comic books where proper visual design is needed to ensure that the panels are both visually appealing as well as easy to understand. A big downfall of many comics is that they either use a strictly linear box progression which quickly becomes boring or position their panels so randomly about the page that the reader needs to pause for a moment to determine the intended sequence of the panels. This particular example is of a comic I have never actually read, but it is an example of fairly good panel design. The panels are not all simple rectangles which gives the comic a good feeling of motion while being very clear as to their sequence. The panels read from right to left, and then from top to bottom in accordance to what their western audience would expect (Eastern comics like manga would likely read from left to right) and thus makes the comic both engaging and immersive for the reader.