Your navigation isn’t just a “menu of options”. It is a reflection of the structure of your website and it helps people understand the virtual space they are traversing.
A client came to me with a new site already scoped. The navigation was decided in a single internal meeting. Someone on the team sketched out headings, the owner approved, and that was that. It felt complete (it matched how the internal team thought about their content) and ready to build.
I will accept the role of the Debbie Downer, sound the “wah-wah” intro…
Good design is invisible
When navigation works, nobody notices it. A visitor who finds what they need in two clicks doesn’t think “Wow, great information architecture!” – they just find what they need and move on.
I’ve written previously about your website as a service. Let’s consider your website navigation within this framework of usability and usefulness.
Navigation has some very important jobs to do. It connects multiple things pulling in different directions: what your business wants people to do, what your users are trying to accomplish, and what search engines need in order to understand your site at all. Therefore, navigation labels need to reflect not only the information architecture of your website but also the language used by your visitors and their jobs-to-be-done.
When we make assumptions, and don’t test them, that can affect every interaction that follows (conversion rates, performance, support tickets, and sales).
The junk drawer called “resources”
Almost every website has had, at one time or another, that generic top-level heading of misbegotten origin:
“We need all of these things and we don’t know what to call them.”
“How about ‘Solutions‘?”
“Perfect!”
Generic labels are essentially meaningless and will ultimately become the final resting place for content that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. A PDF nobody categorized? Resources. A page the sales team asked for last quarter? Solutions.
A dirty magnet is a word or phrase that can mean different things to different people. It is vague and meaningless and can draw attention because it seems like it might be useful. Examples of dirty magnets include Resources; Knowledge Base; Quick Links, and Useful Links. By far, the worst dirty magnet of all is Frequently Asked Questions, which in my experience is the single worst Web design feature I have come across in more than 25 years of helping design websites.
Gerry McGovern, Top Tasks: To Focus On What Matters You Must De-Focus On What Doesn’t
To your users, some of these words seem to promise answers. In reality, these “dirty magnets” pull people away from the genuine scent of information. They are also some of the least-visited, worst-performing sections of a site.
Navigation should answer a task, not describe a content type
Humans like to connect things. Pattern recognition is an important survival skill helping us to navigate complex environments and adapt to new surroundings. But, we are also lazy. If there is a way for our computational brain to do less work, it will pursue the easier path. Hey, energy conservation. No judgment here.
But, when it comes to organizing content there are two pitfalls I see a lot: grouping by audience (forcing people to self-identify disrupts their task) and grouping by content type (PDF, video, white paper). These categories might make sense to your internal team, but I promise you that nobody arrives at a site thinking: “Gee, I wonder where all the PDFs are?”
People think:
- “I need to compare these two options.”
- “I have this specific problem right now – what do I use?”
- “I want the evidence behind this claim before I commit.”
Those are tasks. A well-built navigation maps directly onto them, and treats format – PDF, video, article – as a filter inside a topic, not the top-level label itself. A university’s admissions site shouldn’t lead with “Publications” and “Videos”; it should lead with “Applying,” “Financial Aid,” and “Visit Campus,” with the brochure PDF and the video tour living inside whichever of those actually answers the visitor’s question.
Many organizations have said to me that they already know their top tasks because they’ve got search and website analytics. Search and website analytics are simply not sufficient to give you true and comprehensive insights into the top tasks. For starters, they will rarely give you insight on tasks that you have no content on.
Gerry McGovern, Top Tasks: To Focus On What Matters You Must De-Focus On What Doesn’t
Test your menu structure
If you think you “know,” your bias is showing. Even a well-reasoned, intent-based structure is still a hypothesis until real people try to use it.
Testing with “real users” doesn’t always need to draw from people with specific domain knowledge. If your audience is a general consumer public, general-population usability testing is fine. The more specialized your audience – clinicians, engineers, procurement officers, anyone with domain vocabulary a stranger on a train might not have – the less a general-population test can tell you.
- A card sort is better suited to generating that hypothesis in the first place. Card sorts are a good place to start because they help you get a sense of the words people use and how they group navigation items.
- Tree testing – checking whether people can find a specific thing inside a proposed structure – is usually the right tool once you already have a hypothesis to validate.
All you need are 8–12 people to test your menu structure. Running these exercises is painless, affordable, and can be done remotely (Lyssna is great for this).
Navigation reflects your strategy, not just your structure
Navigation might be one of the least glamorous parts of a website project, but it’s a foundational part that will impact everything else. It provides visual organization of the site as well as reflecting the state of content relationships and structure contained within it.
A task-informed structure indicates there is a clear picture of who your audience is and what they need to accomplish. Think about the tasks and the language people use when planning navigation, and you will be thinking about how your website should work and how content connects. This in turn informs your content strategy. Once you have this governance and logic in place, new content is less likely to be tossed into a junk drawer and your whole website will be easier to maintain over time.
Good design is built to serve the person using the service. If your website menu reads like a list of internal priorities instead of the handful of things your audience actually came there to do, that’s worth testing.
Featured Image: “The Story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.” Illustrated by Henry Justice Ford, The Yellow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, original story by Hans Christian Anderson, London, New York, Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906, pp. 21-25.
