Principles of Designing Quality Navigation

Quality navigation is a very important criteria for a website to be successful and should not be underestimated. A website may have many contents and therefore with a good navigation system, it allows the user to find the content they want quickly. However, a website with a bad navigation system will most likely result in the user being lost or not being able to search for the content they want. The user will not hesitate to abandon such website.

Hence, I will like to share about what I have learnt on principles to consider when designing a good navigation for website. The principles are as followed:

Provide a variety of navigation options

Different users prefer to navigate around the website in different ways. Hence, the website should provide a variety of navigation options for these users. An example of website that applies this principle is Google which allows the user to search in many categories.

Let users know where they are
A good navigation should indicate clearly and unambiguously to a user which page they are on. The website should have a title for every page to show the user which page they are currently on and the link of the page that the user is currently on should look different from the other links in the navigation. 

An example of website that applies this principle is Threadless which uses blue colour to indicate which category the user is currently at.

Let users know where they have been
A good navigation allow the users to know which page they have visited on the website. This can be done by maximising the usage of hypertext for navigation as the hypertext uses default colour such as blue for unclicked links and purple for clicked links. 

Let users know where they are going
A good navigation should allow the user to know where they are going. There are several ways to ensure that: 

• Inform the user in advance if the link is navigating to a non-HTML page such as PDF or Microsoft word as they usually expect the link to navigate to a HTML page
• Insert ALT text to indicate to the user if the navigation uses an image to link to a homepage

An example of website that applies this principle is Wikipedia that insert ALT text on its logo to tell the user it navigates to the homepage.

Be consistent

Users depend on navigation when they are lost in a website. An inconsistent navigation will only cause the user to become more lost. A navigation design should have consistency in classification, graphics and hypertext colour.

Follow web convention

Users prefer to use the navigation skills they get from one website on another as this makes life easier for them. A good navigation should follow the web convention and not avoid them to be unique because the user is sure to get lost in website that does not follow the web convention. Some examples of web convention are as followed:

• "Home" is used for the name of the website homepage
• "Contact" is used to navigate to the page that contain details such as address, email and telephone

Reference:

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2009/07/03/10-principles-of-navigation-design-and-why-quality-navigation-is-so-critical/