Naview - Navigation preview tool for rapid IA prototyping

Quite simply, we like to know who is using our software. All use is logged to help guide further development. You can now enter an email address as an alternative to you Twitter username. Read our privacy statement.

(Please be aware that by using the sharing functionality there is a slight chance of third parties getting access to your navigation structure and username. If in doubt, give it a miss.)

You can now share a navigation structure with your colleagues, clients and users! When previewing a navigation click Share this navigation to store it and get a unique URL you and others can access later. Click Stop sharing this navigation if you want to prevent further access to the navigation – including yourself.

Please read the following before sharing navigations:

• Shared navigation structure is stored for limited time (7 days) – always keep a local copy!
• The URL is unique and not easy to guess, however when your navigation is shared it is (in theory) accessible to anyone over the internet
• Anyone with the URL can view and edit the navigation
• Naview does not check if another person is editing the navigation at the same time so make sure you communicate by other means
• The email address or Twitter username of the most recent editor is displayed in the top left corner
• We do not currently offer user accounts, passwords or other more detailed access control but please let us know if you require this functionality

It is likely that the sharing features and certain configuration options will be moved to a commercial paid plan in the future. Keep an eye on the Naview Twitter feed to get updates on when this might happen.

This version of Naview has the following limitations:

• Saved navigation will only be stored for 7 days
• Maximum 40 characters per topic
• Maximum 100 topics (rows)
• Maximum 4 hierarchical levels
• Maximum 10 topics per level (siblings)
• Maximum 15 KB of input data
• Structure must nest linearly e.g. it should not jump directly from level 1 to 3
• Empty lines and lines starting with # or // are ignored.

The visual theme is based on Basecamp theme for Redmine by Mischa The Evil and the Naview logo is inspired by this diagram in The Science of Biology.

Naview uses stacks of jQuery and the following plugins:

• Superfish jQuery menu plugin by Joel Birch
• Tabs in Textarea plugin by Ted Devito
• fieldSelection plugin by Alex Brem
• Slightly modified Menu Activate on Click plugin for Superfish by Jardeeq

Several code fragments and tips come from the awesome Stack Overflow.

Naview is inspired by Optimal Usability's information architecture testing tool Treejack. Read our post on using Treejack to test your website structure.