Think of the parallels with a printed book: a book’s table of contents and index are always available with a quick flip of the wrist, but stay out of sight and out of mind unless you want them. Similarly here.

I agree with the points made by Ian, who gave it a “C, ” but I give it a “D” for poor accessibility and usability. If you hover over the triangle in the “low bandwidth” version first (by guessing correctly), then you can “tab” through the navigation functionally. But if you think some people are confused about how to find the nav while looking at the page, try adding vision impairment into the equation.

The concept is cool (which I think was Kelsea’s point in directing you to it in the first place), but it can be done just as well with CSS and a bit of javascript using an unordered list that degrades gracefully. That would rate an “A” from me for both design and function.

In fact, it looks to me as if the chief argument for using Flash on that site was that the developer had Flash, knew how to implement it and took the easy way out. To one whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I also agree with Dave. This fits the classic definition of “mystery meat navigation” as defined on the “Web Pages That Suck” site. The idea itself doesn’t suck, but the specific implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

I understand what your point is and do agree with you that it’s a different approach to navigation design. I too didn’t have an issue figuring out that hovering over or clicking on the orange triangle would do something–I wasn’t sure what but that doesn’t bother me on an entertainment site.

On sites such as these I think we need to consider that the Maroon 5 fan is looking for a unique EXPERIENCE. There are things about the Green Day website (http://www.greenday.com/greenday.html) that are similarly “unusable”—the positioning on the navigation shifts from section to section—but I enjoyed the graphic experience and taking my time to explore. It’s not like I’m in desperate need to find bio information about the band and, “OMG, I can’t find it! I’ll never come back to this site again!” On the other hand, if an e-commerce site tried something like this I would be confused/annoyed that the navigation was concealed (Maroon 5) or always shifting (Green Day).

From an IA and usability standpoint, I have issues with both sites but I know that you are isolating this to a creative navigation/experience/visual design conversation. So, I’ll compartmentalize.

Unlike Start, which takes a lot of room when expanded, I’d be tempted to allow “lock” of visibility on of a small menu so that if I’m using or referencing it quickly, I don’t need to move my mouse up there and wait for the hover to appear to see where I can go. Irrelevant for a website, but maybe important for a web app.

The implementation is unlike anything I’ve seen in terms of flexibility and dynamic content delivery. The live search is incredible, not only does it pop up the list of matches, but the items in the list are hoverable to show the item details. The faceted browsing is extremely powerful and is combined with advanced filtering options that are persistent as you browse within the hierarchy. The object description pages are tied to related metadata to facilitate exploration of other important information about that object.

It may be a bit confusing to people who don’t play Warcraft, but in terms of fitness-to-purpose it is amazing.

Navigation exists to allow a user to select/find content/functions. Does that imply that the navigation has to be visible at all times? If I know where to go to “open my map”, is that broken navigation?

And is it not true that everything other than the content and function of a website or web application serves no other purpose than to deliver the content and function?

Should all navigation be restricted to a horizontal bar across the top or vertical bar down the left side of our sites and apps?

I disagree.