A good website deserves the best website navigation practices. If you want your website to be popular and your interesting content to be read, you have to ensure it will be usable and easily navigated.
This is the core rule of quality interaction and the highlight of creativity and ability to provide good-looking and functional design. Therefore, take a look at your menus and reorganize them in a simplified manner.
As we said-navigation is essential. Website navigation design is what distinguishes good websites from excellent ones.
The importance of perfect website navigation design
Image source: Fireart Studio
Easy to navigate websites are officially the most successful ones. A website which offers consistent links and clearly divided content is likely to lead users deeper inside the site and to inspire welcoming feelings that will keep them there.
On the other hand, if you produce complex workflows that require a chain of apparently unrelated actions, your users will not find what they are looking for and they will leave.
Good navigation menus can be compared to traffic signs on the road which give directions and make movement easier. The first thing your users need to know is their exact position, in order to determine where to move next. Therefore, navigation is the essential element of well-executed user experience.
Image source: Alexander Haniotis
Nowadays, there is a huge choice of navigation menus, all of them creative and original. It is difficult to choose a beautiful one, being sure at the same time that it will be an effective one.
The navigation trend is slowly changing – from visually dominant, centered menus to the modern website navigation best practices. Navigation menus are usually marked with recognizable icons, consisting of three horizontal stripes; and accessed with a single click.
Consistent structuring
Image source: Nick Franchi
In order not to confuse your users, you have to employ simple elements and logical structure. The visitor ought to be able to access the information he wants without any complications or delays. Therefore, keep it simple! Don’t leave them any space to wonder what to read or which route to take.
The best way to achieve this is to divide and organize content in sequences and to order it in a consecutive list of different topics, starting with the broadest one and moving to the most detailed one. Alphabetic order, indexes, lexicons or glossaries can also be very helpful.
What would users do without menus? Menus are the first item we look for when visiting a website. They reveal a list of actions to choose from, which means they introduce us to the contents.
Usability
Image source: Farzad Ban
Menus are control containers which consist of at least two items and are opened through a single button or pointer.
The menu usually contains discrete items which lead to different actions/operations which could affect a particular element or the entire app/website.
The best type of menu is the contextual one, which adjusts to the app’s current state and changes its items in a dynamic manner.
Items
The basic limitation of every menu is that each action/item ought to be described with a single line of text. Still, the description should be clear enough to explain the exact effect of that action.
Therefore, the description usually consists of a single word/short sentence, but it can also have icons, additional explanations, or shortcuts and controls indicating the selected items/actions.
A general rule for static menus is that the most popular and frequently triggered items are placed at the very beginning.
Dynamic menus, on the other hand, give priority to recently used items and they modify the order according to the visitors’ behavior.
Basic menus
Image source: eremiebattaglia.com
Basic menus are simple and they usually stand close to the screen edges. The idea is to make them as visible/accessible as possible.
Therefore, basic menus are the perfect solution for mobile devices (both phones and tablets) which display clearly all the options related to specific items.
Tips for efficient navigation
Best website navigation is designed in accordance with the following guidelines:
Well-classified links
Image source: natan.be
One of the things you should consider is the importance of the links you’re including and to organize them accordingly. The purpose is to enable users to locate information quickly and not to lose time browsing through different categories of content.
Remember: Link location is extremely important for visitors who are changing pages as they are probably interested in information related to the previous page they visited.
Clearance and prominence
Image source: Kamil Głowiński
One of the basic rules is to keep navigation clear and prominent. For the purpose, you ought to choose the right links and to place them in the right place. Overall, the best navigation location is at the top/the left side of the page, as these are the most obvious places the eye lies on.
However, don’t make navigation too obvious, but integrate it discreetly within your design.
Consistency
Consistency is one of the most important features of successful web navigation. You have to repeat the most important links on each page, always positioned in the same place/manner, serving the same purpose. Positioning the same menus in different locations could be too confusing for the users.
Understandability
Image source: palace-pobierowo.pl
Keep users focused on the main point and maintain the content easy to understand. Instead of using long and complicated links, you should save space and replace the links with short explanations. One thing is for sure-users will not click on a link unless they are completely sure where it would take them!
Organizing them properly
Image source: magazine-mint.fr
Proper link organization is one of the main purposes of well-structured menus. This is why you should think about proper website navigation, in case your website is dealing with a lot of links divided in numerous categories and sub-categories.
Navigation is a crucial factor for the success of one website. It ensures an intuitive workflow which leads users towards easy and interesting interfaces. Great navigation design facilitates the search and scanning of content and it indexes the outcome.
The thing you don’t want to see is visitors trapped on a page, with no solution to move towards the action they wanted. Make it easy for them-let them move easily from one place to the other and try to attract them towards the other options your website has to offer.
Final thoughts
Image source: pygmy-elephant.com
Proper navigation design is the basis for website usability. Satisfied customers who have no trouble moving between pages or finding what they need are the most likely ones to remain on the website. At the end of the day, your website will have more visitors; it will improve their experience; and it will make the website more profitable.
The responsiveness rule counts also for mobile devices. Nowadays, when users are accessing more and more information thorough their phones/tablets, designers are facing the challenge of producing mobile-friendly navigation which can work equally well on all kinds of devices.
The central element of properly-executed navigation design is an efficient navigation menu. It is so important that the website could not function properly without it. Navigation menus give directions and simplify the workflow, informing users how to access a particular page, or at least where they are at the moment. Therefore, the better a navigation menu is, the more usable a website will become.
Source: http://ift.tt/1WChMoB
No comments:
Post a Comment