Effective website navigation is essential to a site’s ability to generate sales and to its overall success. This is what holds your site together and enables customers to communicate their intentions through it. It, therefore, behooves you to properly develop a system that most of your potential viewers can understand and negotiate with the utmost ease. If you do not do this, your site is little more than online art.
Useful Navigation Menus
Image source: Tom Sayer
Great website navigation design is predicated on satisfying user goals and it begins with developing useful navigation menus. These menus are central to making any website, no matter how complex, easy to navigate and helpful to customers. If your menus enable users to find the information they need as quickly as possible, your website will likely be successful. If not, you risk losing your internet traffic.
The navigation within a website can be a complex issue. There is no one “right” way of defining navigation:
- It can have different purposes, depending on the website.
- It can merely refer to efficiently directing readers to the content they are looking for.
- It also is used to subtly lead users to places the site owner wants them, in order to generate interest and/or sales.
Oftentimes, navigation is used to accomplish both to direct users to what they are searching for and to what the site owner wants them to see.
Fuel your web design fascination with these curated design resources.
Developing Content for the Navigation System
Image source: Yury Smirnov
Although there is no one answer to how to design a site’s navigation, there are some tips that help you minimize its chances of failure. The first of these tips is to develop your site’s content before developing the system to navigate it.
Great website navigation design requires that your Information Architecture is in place before your navigation. It is the same concept as deciding what cities you want to include on a map, before drawing roads between cities.
It is important to realize that the primary objective of a website is to attract and hold the interest of users, which eventually benefits the site owner. Therefore, it is most important that a site developer sees content from a reader’s perspective, rather than that of the site owner. This might upset the owner, but it will actually benefit him/her in the future.
Make It Functional
Image source: Ayers Rock Boat
The readers are who the navigation should be designed for. Navigation should be functional, not merely aesthetically pleasing, and serve the needs of the users rather than those of the organization. Therefore, it should be written in common language and not filled with unnecessary organizational jargon.
In order to design the most effective website navigation, it is necessary to actually interact with users and discover what their navigational needs are. Readers should be involved in the navigation development process from the very beginning.
Developers should question them about how they would like to interact with a website. They should also provide users with diagrams of how various systems would work. Of course, developers need to offer readers multiple navigational options, since not everyone will want to navigate the website in the same way. This is sometimes difficult because of the need to integrate many varied options into one program.
Indicate Users Where They Are on the Website
Image source: plug & play
A great navigation design is one where users always know what page they are on and where they are on a website. This reduces the confusion and frustration of readers and increases the likelihood they will continue using your website.
Large lettering, with clear meanings, should be used to indicate where a customer is on a site. Hypertext should be utilized when presenting navigation. The highest order navigation can use graphical form, but the label of the page the reader is on should differ from the other navigational labels.
The navigation area should be kept simple, with unnecessary information and multiple non-essential options kept out of it. A site’s usability should trump all else and encourage efficient use of information for navigational purposes.
Doing this is often more complex than developing navigation overloaded with information and options. With such a complex system, it is possible to connect to many different informational locations within a website, through only four options. This can make finding the information you need a much more efficient process and reduce frustration.
“Contact” and “Help” Options
Image source: Panic
Designers should group large amounts of user-targeted information into only a few categories on the navigational menu. Make these options understandable to the reader and avoid overly lengthy wording. This will make it easier for readers to find the type of information they are interested in, without making them wade through tomes of material that is useless to them.
Customers should have access to help, as they are navigating your website if they experience any difficulty. There should be a “Contact” option that tells them how to contact the site managers via various methods, including by postal mail, email, or by phone.
Good navigation systems should also contain a “Help” option that gives users immediate text answers and explanations for difficult tasks. Such textual help takes the place of in-person feedback they would have received if they were performing a task out in public. In providing users with such support, the website gains user trust, reduces their frustrations, and encourages them to stay on the site and make a purchase.
Redesign to Better Meet User Demands
Image source: Juraj Molnár
Technological innovations and new techniques are changing the way navigation are designed. Users now have the option of moving navigation menus according to where they want them. These menus can be positioned horizontally, vertically, or set up so that they move across the screen.
The best navigation is designed through trial and error, by designing, testing, checking the stats on your website and then redesigning things to better meet user demands. Ultimately, the goal of any designer is to make their system intuitive, efficient and user-friendly.
In conclusion, great website navigation design focuses entirely on user needs. It attempts to make their experience as pleasant, efficient and useful as possible. This, in turn, makes them feel more comfortable, less frustrated, and more likely to remain on your website.
The end result is providing the website operator with more internet traffic, generating more interest in the operator’s products and/or services, and probably stimulating sales.
Credit for featured image: Eddie Lobanovskiy
