The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation

The navigation of a website is one of its most important component.

Sure, most of your users come in through search engines now instead of via your home page, but how can they get from whatever page they're on to any other page they might want to go to?

The limited space available at the top and sides of most web pages (at least when compared to the amount of content many contain) makes good navigation design difficult, but vital. Following are five principles of effective navigation.

1. Clicking the Logo Always Goes Home

As a corollary to the above advice, it is very important to be certain that clicking your website's logo will take your visitor back to your home page. I recently visited a website where clicking their logo caused a pop-up window to open, describing the logo.

Do they really think that was what I wanted? Why on earth would anyone click on the logo to learn about it? This is a typical example of a bad navigation design.

2. Don't Be Original

Don't be original? What kind of advice is that? Well, if you spend any time visiting sites on the web, you should realise that it's better advice than it might sound.

Let's say you've just landed at some website for a search. You read a bit, you're interested, but you'd like to know more about what this website is and why it's here – basically, can you trust it? If you're anything like me, you look around for a navigation link called 'about', 'about us', or something similar.

If you call this link something else, for example – 'philosophy', - will only confuse your visitors, and make them less able to find what they're looking for. No matter how much you might dislike the conventions of the web, you have to accept that we're stuck with them at this point, at least if you want your website to be as usable as it can be.

People treat the logo-home link as a lifeline in the same way that they do the Back button: you break this rule at your own risk.

3. Always Include Search

Often, visitors can't be bothered to search through your menu systems for what they're looking for, especially if you have a large website. This fact makes it all the more important that you provide a search box right there on the navigation bar. This is an actual input box where your visitors can type in what they would like to search, with a button next to it labelled 'Search'.

In fact some visitors may even get upset if they don't find a search box. Also do make sure that pressing the enter key after typing in the box takes them to the search results page.

4. Highlight on Hover

When a visitor is hovering over part of your effective navigation system, you need to highlight the option they've got selected, so that they know where they are. Every non-web navigation system you've ever used does exactly this, so there is no reason why websites should not. You don't want your visitors to be guessing what their clicks are about to do – you want them to be absolutely sure.

In navigation that has more than one level, this principle is even more important (that is, where you can follow an arrow to get to a sub-menu). You've got to keep both the name of the sub-menu and the selected item on the sub-menu highlighted: otherwise, visitors are likely to forget which sub-menu they selected, or not realise that they accidentally selected the wrong one.

5. Use Breadcrumbs

Finally, if you have pages that are deeply nested in a navigation hierarchy, make sure you offer 'breadcrumbs' to let visitors know where they've come from. For example, a set of breadcrumbs for this article might look like this:

Articles > Web Design > Navigation > The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation

In this case, clicking on 'Articles', 'Web Design' or 'Navigation' would take you to indexes for those categories, containing sub-categories and perhaps more articles. For examples of breadcrumb navigation in action, take a look at the big search directories like dmoz.org and yahoo.com.

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