How important is navigation in your website?

by Leanne Smith, Sleek Services

December 2005

How getting your navigation right can mean the difference between life
and death for your website.

Never underestimate how important navigation is.

I'll say it again.

Never underestimate how important navigation is.

The best navigation is navigation that you don't even notice - you just think "this site has a lot of information - it's exactly what I was looking for!"

When someone visits your website the first thing the read on the page is content. Fair enough. But if it's the wrong content they'll wander off frustrated, never having found the perfect thing they wanted, which was waiting for them if they'd just bothered to visit the next page.

Usability expert Jacob Nielsen reports an e-commerce project where the draft home page had three ways of getting to the products. It used one search function and two different navigation schemes, both of which showed a list of choices. One navigation scheme showed the choices in the way that most users group them; the other the way the manufacturer's own staff would classify products.

Okay, its easy to guess that the one that grouped products the way that users group them was more effective. But can you guess how much more effective it was? Usability testing showed the success rate was 80% when people used the client-centred navigation and only 9% when people used navigation designed around the staff's needs. That means that by simply changing the navigation this particular company could've increased their sales by 900%! Why would you not do that?

There are a few simple rules I would stick to for navigation:

  1. Break your navigation structure down in ways that are meaningful to the user, not to you. The most common example of this is that you receive your information by supplier - each supplier sends you bumpf on all of their products. But very few visitors are looking for a shower built by Hydrolux but most visitors will be looking for a shower that fits their shower bay or that has/doesn't have waterjets, so it makes sense to group products by size or functionality, not manufacturer.
  2. Use global navigation with the same links in the same place on every page.
    Global navigation would be to different departments for a large site or the other pages for a site of less than ten pages.
  3. 3. Use local navigation in the same place on every page. Local navigation gets you around the department you are in. A department might be Articles, as opposed to Products, or even Electrical Products as opposed to Hand Tools.
  4. For a site of more than 50 pages, use breadcrumbs or similar to show users where they've come from and where they are in the navigational tree. (eg Home Accessories - Electronic - Media Players)

So essentially, keep it consistent and keep it focused towards the user's needs, not yours.

These rules are stunningly simple but often overlooked because navigation is seen as a design feature rather than a piece of
functionality.

Today I visited a site because I knew it had something I wanted to know about. The navigation on the front page went to several different places
- one link went to one product, another link went to About Us (except that is was called something else - neither "About Us" or the name of
the organisation), other links went to different subjects that the organisation deal with. I knew they had the information I wanted because
I'd read it in a book - so in the end I googled the whole site. And exactly what I needed. But I still had no idea how it related to the
other things I'd seen or how to get back there. And if I hadn't read the book that told me this site had the info I needed I would've given up
after a cursory glance at the first page. Most users won't bother if they can't see what they're looking for straight away. Would you?

And don't you respect your users enough to make it easy for them to buy from you?

Leanne Smith is a founder of Sleek Services, a popular web solutions service that builds intelligent websites for intelligent people. For more articles or to see what an intelligent, high-traffic website can do for you visit www.SleekServices.net.

© Sleek Services 2005. Please do not reproduce without either a link or permission.