Navigation Standards Every Web Designer Should Know
October 7th, 2008 | Posted in Resources |
Website navigation should be as predictable as the location of a toothbrush or an alarm clock on a house. That is what I read about in the Web Designer Magazine’s story, “The Lost Art Of Navigation” by Graham Jones. It is a good point that he brings up, as he starts his article with, “If I gave you the keys to my house and asked you to find a particular object in it, you would probably be able to get a hold of it fairly quickly. Even though you’ve never been to my house, you’d have a pretty good idea where to find my computer, an alarm clock, or my toothbrush. No matter what I asked you to look for, you’d be able to find it pretty quickly.”
We assume that the toothbrush would be located in the bathroom, and alarm clock would be on a nightstand next to the bed in a bedroom and the computer would be in an office, spare bedroom or a den. Our mind organizes the world around us and it helps us be able to get around in it.
When it comes to navigating our websites, we want the visitors to be able to get around just as easily. The navigation on a site should be built around the already established standards that one might expect.
Home button or a link is expected to be somewhere at the top and left area of the website. I tried to be creative and use other names for this but the word Home still makes more sense than anything else. Contact Us is another one that should always be within the navigation, people expect it to right there, to the right, if and whenever they might need it. The About Us is expected to answer the questions of who it is that is running this website, what this site is all about, to get background on the establishment.
“Transparent navigation” is what comes to mind, I must have heard that somewhere before. Don’t make the visitor think, place the buttons, links and content where the visitor expects it to be naturally. This shall bring you riches and success. 
There is a way to test your site, the article talks about the Navigation Stress Test that I found to be very interesting. It has actually been invented, or “pioneered” is the word they used, in 1997 by an IBM user experience designer named Keith Instone. The test consists of printing out the website in black and white and annotating it. By looking at the print outs and hopefully being able to answer the 3 simple questions, “Where am I?”, Where Here Is?” and “Where Can I Go?”
This little test should be able to show what a visitor has to go through to navigate through a site and it should help structure or re-structure your site for easier navigation for a visitor that is seeing it for the first time.
Does anyone know of any other good website testing techniques that would help planning a website layout for better user experience? Please share with us in the comments.
3 Responses to “Navigation Standards Every Web Designer Should Know”
By Anrkist on Oct 7, 2008 | Reply
There’s really nothing more frustrating than form beating out function. Other types of navigation, such as links within the page copy should also be obvious. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to remove underlined links and just make them bold/same color as the copy. Your design is useless if no one can use it. =]
By valiik on Oct 7, 2008 | Reply
Yesss! I though I was the only one having to deal with that. Some website owner do not understand and sometimes refuse to listen to advice. They have a vision of how the site should look but have not thought about the functionality and usability.
By Maneet Puri on Oct 8, 2008 | Reply
I guess all designers face this thing with difficult customers. Its best to explain to the client the benefits of concentrating on accessibility and functionality features.