What navigation research needs to be done in light of the Web?

Some of the existing research on navigation should be applied to the Web (browsers, mainly). But the Web has also invented a new kind of navigation. The HCI community should be looking into this new type of navigation.

Navigation on the Web exists in five forms:

Browser navigation: back, history, etc.
Content navigation: hypertext links, buttons inserted in the page, etc.
Within-page navigation: scrolling, mainly, but with VRML and applets, this will begin to vary more. Especially interesting is the switch from 2D to 3D with VRML.
Multi-browser navigation: using a couple of browsers simultaneously
Application navigation: going from a word processor to a browser, and vice versa, for example.

instone@acm.org / 96-05-07