It’s not enough for a website to simply look good. It’s not even enough to have a good product. If a user can’t find their way to that product, the best images in the world won’t help your sales.
As designers it’s our job to take stock of the behaviour of typical users and position navigational elements where users would expect to find them.
Your navigation will be based on the Information Architecture (IA) – the structure and organisation – of your site. When choosing a navigation type you should weigh up its limitations and benefits. Will it be a series of buttons? Is it Flash-based? Does it use any special features? Where is it on a page?
Navigation that works well
The navigation on this site used to be barely distinguishable from a table of random words – I even had it earmarked as one of my bad examples. It was a nested fly-out horror. After a well-needed extreme makeover, the site now has links to all the subtle sub-sub-genres of house music, accessible from every page. This encourages the visitor to browse all the departments of products available for sale and drives sales.
This is just one example of a popular trend. Evan’s top-level navigation solves the problem of single-keyword labels on navigation – using economical typography he is able to provide a description of the content within a section.
In the same vein as the above example, Smashing Magazine’s navigation buttons provide a link to the top-level article section, with smaller links to the sub-categories for quick access. This shows that good navigation doesn’t have to be complex if it is well thought out.
What doesn’t work?
The most common problems with bad navigation are:
- Inconsistency – the navigation elements look different, or are in a different place, on various pages within the same site.
- Discontinuity – when it is difficult to get from one interior page to another without returning to the home page or, worse, when it is difficult to return to the home page.
- Bad organization – a section may have six or seven levels, but it isn’t clear to the user how to get to them.
By the same token, well-thought out navigation adds a lot of value to a design. At least in my examples the navigation is placed where I would expect to find it.
Thanks for your comments. My article is by no means exhaustive, – I will follow it up with further thoughts on the subject soon.
And don’t forget the overall layout of the site, I think a couple of those examples have a mind-blowing number of graphics and links on the page, distracting from the navigation in a quite a serious way. If you want a pleasurable user experience, beware the busy page.
Great article! I will now be looking at website with a different and learned view. Thank you