For a website with any more than half a dozen pages, navigation is necessary for your user to find what he seeks. And on larger sites with 10, 100 or 1000 pages, navigation is crucial. But how do you make it intuitive?
Most users expect to see a horizontal bar across the top or a vertical menu down the left side of the screen. Intuitive design is all about providing what visitors expect because that’s the way it works on other websites.
So, always try to follow convention. Here are a few conventional tips to use when you are designing your navigation,
- Avoid giving people more than 7 choices. If you have more options, divide them into logical groups or sections, with links to each section and sub-links to the individual pages
- Always make it clear it’s a link or navigation bar. Links, by convention are blue and underlined. Or, use CSS to colour-code your links. A navigation bar should stand out as such. And be consistent on every page.
- For large sites, use drop-down menus. Moving a mouse over a link reveals a sub-menu with links to additional pages, which can continue for many layers. Suckerfish dropdowns use simpler CSS instead of Javascript.
- Use a bread-crumb trail to tell your visitor where they are on your site. For example, home>camcorders>sony, clearly shows what page you are looking at. And they should be links so you can reverse too.
- Provide a site search box, which by convention is in the top right of the page. Pay attention to the search page results with meaningful page headings and short description of the page.
Most designers understand the need for usability, and nothing is more important to the design of a usable site than clear, consistent and intuitive navigation.
