The navigation on NPR is unique for a couple reasons.
Observations
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To find the “digital life” section you might have to click the following links: Business > Technology > Digital Life, but you would not be able to navigate here directly. They hide sometimes several levels of links, there are no drop-downs. You just have to click and find out.
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In addition to this, links are sometimes redundant. For example, Technology contains Digital Life and Business; but Digital Life also contains Technology; and Business contains Technology and several other links. It’s a highly subjective style of navigation.
Thoughts
In reference to (1) above: it’s is an interesting choice to make. just musing here: is an experience of ‘getting lost’ on the site something they’re trying to design for? in the best sense, it could perhaps amount to some kind of serendipitous discovery? designing for serendipity? numerically it seems to promote something like “pages per visit” …
(2) this seems like it already has a name, this kind of weird phenomenological IA It’s like someone thought “we have these related articles here at the bottom… why don’t we just do that with navigation labels too, at the top?”
For reference: https://www.npr.org
ya’ll have any thoughts on either of these?