Navigation Articles & Videos

  • Page Parking: Multi-Tab Mania

    Browser tabs separate the stages of collection and comparing and serve as memory aids to keep many alternate pages available for consideration as users are shopping or researching. 7 UX guidelines support this user behavior, which is particularly common among younger users.

  • Navigation: You Are Here

    You-are-here navigation consists of signs that help orient website visitors as they explore the site. Many websites need stronger location indicators.

  • Utility Navigation: What It Is and How to Design It

    Utility navigation consists of secondary actions and tools, such as contact, subscribe, save, sign in, share, change view, print.

  • Audience-Based Navigation: 5 Reasons to Avoid It

    Role-based IAs increase cognitive effort and user anxiety. Clear language and mutually exclusive categories reduce the chance of harming the user experience.

  • Supporting Mobile Navigation in Spite of a Hamburger Menu

    Mobile sites using a hamburger or three-line menu need to support navigation activities throughout the site, in case users don't locate or use the main navigation.

  • Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable

    Whether you adopt a flat-design style or not, interactive components must retain sufficient cues to suggest clickability. Signaling clickability with cues such as borders, color, size, consistency, placement, and adherence to web standards can give interactive components the proper look.

  • Top 3 IA Questions about Navigation Menus

    The number and order of navigation categories, and use of hover menus for touchscreens are frequently asked questions that arise when organizing information on a website or application.

  • A Link is a Promise

    The words in a link label make a strong suggestion about the page that is being linked to. The destination page should fulfill what the anchor text promises.

  • Search Is Not Enough: Synergy Between Navigation and Search

    When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.

  • Maximize the Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen

    On a large screen, hiding the chrome significantly affects discoverability and interaction cost, with virtually no improvement to the content-to-chrome ratio.

  • Icon Usability

    A user’s understanding of an icon is based on previous experience. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity.

  • Low Findability and Discoverability: Four Testing Methods to Identify the Causes

    Use IA- and UI-focused user research to determine if low findability and discoverability are caused by site information architecture or navigation design.

  • The Difference Between Information Architecture (IA) and Navigation

    IA is the information backbone of the site; navigation refers to those elements in the UI that allow users to reach specific information on the site.

  • Avoid Format-Based Primary Navigation

    Format-based navigation, such as links to Videos, at the top levels of a website’s information architecture lacks sufficient context and information scent for topic-focused users.

  • Bad Intranet Navigation Labels: 3 Workarounds

    Many intranets are saddled with poorly understood labels. If you can't change them, add context to make these labels more transparent to users.

  • Mobile Navigation: Image Grids or Text Lists?

    For mobile navigation, image grids should be saved for deeper IA levels where visual differentiation between menu items is critical.

  • Filters vs. Facets: Definitions

    Filters and faceted navigation both reduce large masses of content to a more narrowly focused display, but facets add more power while requiring more work.

  • Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword

    To help users quickly find what they need, anchor text should stand out from the body content and accurately describe the page that it refers to.

  • Intranet Information Architecture (IA) Trends

    Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.

  • Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid

    For desktop sites, demoting your main content categories into a drop-down menu makes it harder for users to discover your offerings.