Each week until the conference, our editors will put together a short article spotlighting one of the speakers featured at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability 2010 Conference that contains a description of the session, an explanation of why they selected that speaker for that session, and a brief interview with the speaker about their session. Today's IRWD Spotlight Speaker is Thomas Parkinson.

Even as users become more search-centric, navigation remains key to revealing product assortment and building credibility with the shopper. Creating good navigation through a site is not easy because site designers often don't understand how shoppers are actually using their site. Successful navigation becomes further complicated by the three primary types of navigation—product organization, product selection and page signage. This session will feature a leading design consultant and a retailer with a huge, ever-changing product assortment who will walk attendees through the important elements of navigation and how to make sure shoppers can easily navigate your site.

With a large and frequently-changing assortment, online grocery stores face a particularly big challenge in organizing their web sites so as to direct shoppers quickly toward what they want to find. As one of the web's first grocery merchants, Peapod has mastered that challenge, expanding where others in the category have failed, expanding its coverage and growing sales to in excess of $373 million. This session will provide an industry veteran's take on site navigation that successfully supports a broad mix of shopper needs and product types.

"Don't expect any fancy PowerPoint slides in this seminar, just real world experience and hard knocks learning," Thomas says. "I will take you through 20 years of developing seven completely different versions of Peapod's on-line and website ordering systems, starting with MS-DOS to Windows, Mac and the Web. I'll talk about the challenges of creating a simple interface for making it easy to put 60 items in a cart; explore search, browse, smart lists and sophisticated filtering; and preview the making of the 8th version of the Peapod service now in the works."