Mobile navigation must be discoverable, accessible, and take little screen space. Exposing the navigation and hiding it in a hamburger both have pros and cons.
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.
Role-based IAs increase cognitive effort and user anxiety. Clear language and mutually exclusive categories reduce the chance of harming the user experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.
On a large screen, hiding the chrome significantly affects discoverability and interaction cost, with virtually no improvement to the content-to-chrome ratio.
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.
Use IA- and UI-focused user research to determine if low findability and discoverability are caused by site information architecture or navigation design.
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.
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.
Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.