Navigation

One of an ongoing series of articles discussing usability issues in technology and how to improve the overall experience for the user

One of the simplest ways to make your website easy to use is to improve the navigation. Even though doing this is relatively simple, many sites still neglect to do so. Implementing improved navigation not only means your visitors will stay longer and visit more pages, it also means that your site will have improved search engine optimisation. By having confusing navigation your visitors will get confused so will give up, often after only visiting your front page.

So here are some tips to improve your site’s navigation. Even if you only implement just a few of these your site will be much more usable, but of course I recommend you implement them all!

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  Red Nose Day 2009 site. Note
  the ‘home’ text above the logo, top left

  Link the site logo/title to the front page — It’s become natural for the user to be able to click on the top site banner to get back to the front page, so make it a link. This also makes it easier for the user to get to the front page. Some sites also highlight the fact that the logo goes to the front page, such as the Red Nose Day 2009 site (see right), although this isn’t necessary

• Make all pages reachable within three clicks — Make it easy to get to a page, and make sure the user doesn’t have to click from page to page to get to where they want to go: after about three clicks the user will probably give up. Good ways of shortening the number of clicks required include sitemaps and search
• Consider using breadcrumbs/sitemaps — These are both secondary navigation, but can prove invaluable if the user is lost
• Consider using search — If your site has a lot of pages, then search is the best way of finding something. Implement a decent search (Google provide a search for sites) and make it easy to find: the top right or in the sidebar is the most common positions for the search box
• Tell the user where they’ve been, where they are, and where they are going — …if the page is one in a series of stages. A breadcrumb-style navigation is a useful method of doing this, or prev and next links can also help
• Keep navigation consistant — This will help the user find their way around the site. Having a navigation that considerably changes from page to page will only confuse the visitor
• Highlight visited and current pages — Linked to the “where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going” guideline. Highlighting visited links helps the visitor know where they’ve already been, saving the user having to click the browser’s back button after realising they’ve already read the page. Highlighting the current page simply tells the user where they are. Whether or not the current page link should be clickable is a debate that will probably never be resolved, but personally I say you should so that the visitor can get the URL using the right-click popup menu