Finding Your Way: Creating Effective Web Site Navigation
Learn to create customer-friendly navigation on your site to help boost your sales.
I recently played Taboo, a party game in which you describe a word without using certain related phrases. My word was “adrenaline.” With my vocabulary limited by the restricted words, I told my partner that this was what people felt while riding on roller coasters. “Nauseous,” he yelled. Steve couldn’t read my mind, so he said what came to his.
This is a lot like a customer’s first visit to your Web site. They don’t know what you were thinking when you designed the site. They come armed only with instinct and experience. It’s up to you to give the customer an experience that they can figure out without reading your mind.
When customers leave a site frustrated and confused, the most likely culprit is poor navigation. Navigation can prevent a customer from finding what they want, and what you want them to find. If they can’t get to there with ease, you’ve lost that opportunity to communicate, and maybe that customer.
So what constitutes good navigation?
For navigation to be effective, it must be intuitive. This means that anyone should be able to land on a page of your site and know where they are, where they’ve been and how to get where they’re going. It shouldn’t take anything more than common sense.
Doing it the “Right Way”
While there is no “right way” to design navigation, your customers are used to certain conventions on a site, and they bring an expectation that those conventions will be embodied on your site. To design an effective Web site, you must start with your customers.
“Customer experience design” is an approach Web site organization that puts the customer first in every design decision. Requiring a combination of imagination and research, this tactic centers on thinking like a customer. It commonly includes research and testing with members of the target audience to determine their expectations prior to doing any design work. Once you know what your customer wants, you can design a site to give it to them, and make it easy for them to find it.
First, Some Definitions
There are several types of navigation that almost all sites share:
Primary navigation menu
This is a set of links to your site’s most important top-level categories. This menu should be accessible from all your site’s pages. Typical examples include products, services, or “about us.”
Local navigation menu
Under each top-level category, sites will have links to several subpages. They may even be grouped into subcategories. These links become available when you select a top-level category. For example, a list of products would appear when you click on a primary level “products” link.
Links to related information
On pages about a certain topic, many sites offer a set of links to information related to this topic elsewhere on the site or on other sites.
Embedded links
Inside your content, you can include hyperlinks to relevant pages located elsewhere on the site.
Utility navigation
This is a set of globally-accessible links that are not as important as your primary topics. Typically, they’re at the top and/or bottom of the page. These might include links such as “privacy policy” or “site map.”
Search
If users cannot find what they are looking for by browsing your site, or if they are looking for something very specific and don’t have time to browse, then they’ll appreciate having a search function. Search is typically placed on the upper right quadrant of the page.
Site map
A page containing a site map with links to most of the pages in the site, grouped by categories can also help users find information. Site maps also help with your rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo!.
Placement
In the USA, our traditional reading style of left to right and top to bottom leads the majority of Web designers to choose to place the primary navigation either on the left side or the top.
Most sites put the primary navigation horizontally across the top. Then, the links that belong under each primary category appear on the left-hand side of the page, below the primary navigation bar. This helps set the top level apart from the lower level. Although there’s nothing that says you have to do it this way, it does resonate well with your customers because they have gotten used to that format.
Best Practices
Navigation isn’t just about placement, though. The following are best practices when creating navigation for a Web site:
“You Are Here”
In your navigation menu, the page the user is on right now should be visually highlighted and it should be reflected in the headline on the page. This helps answer these crucial questions:
- Where am I now?
- What is the relationship of this page to the rest of the site?
- Where can I go from here to find what I am looking for?
- How would I come back to this page if I left it?
Stand-Alone Pages
No matter what page a customer is on, they should see at least the primary navigation. Keep in mind that a visitor might arrive at a page deep in your site from a search engine—without having seen your home page.
Home Page Access
Every page should have a link back to the home page. Most customers are used to the convention that the primary branding logo will contain a link to home.
Hierarchy
Pages should be grouped into logical categories that make sense to your audience. Pages should be organized by importance, with the most important pages in the primary navigation and the secondary pages branching off from them.
Minimize Depth
How many top-level categories should I have? How many categories should I have under them? How many levels deep should my site go? There’s no magic number.
You should make sure that the most important information is located within a few clicks from the home page. Users perform better with broader, shallower sites (more links up front), but if they see too many links, they tend to have a hard time.
Link Titles
Link text should be specific and descriptive, but not too long. Your audience should have a good idea of what they’ll find when they click on a link.
Link Order
In a set of links, put the most important ones first. People tend to click on those first. By anticipating your customers’ needs, you can determine which information they are most likely looking for and make those links at the top of the list.
“Clickability”
Set apart your navigation menus to distinguish them from each other and from your body copy. Make sure your links look clickable. Typical clickability cues include:
- Grouping links in a list
- Color
- Underlines
- “Highlight” effect when you mouse-over the link
- Arrows
Conversely, make sure items that are not clickable don’t look clickable.
Consistency
Make sure your navigation menus and hyperlink styles have a consistent visual treatment and location from page to page. Don’t force your visitor to “relearn” how your site works every time they go to a new page.
Summing It Up
Easy-to-use and intuitive sites encourage customers to browse more, learn more, and ultimately, buy more. Test your site with fresh eyes to see if your navigation is clear. If possible, conduct testing with your intended audience. Your effort and their input will help create an effective site.
By incorporating these elements into the navigation, customers will be able to figure your site out on their own. That way, they don’t have to read your mind.
