Navigation design: a practical guide

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. This guide covers what navigation design actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why it matters

Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How we handle it

Label links by what people want, not by your org chart. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

A visible current-page state prevents visitors getting lost. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable
• Label links by what people want, not by your org chart
• A visible current-page state prevents visitors getting lost
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Warning signs

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Turning this into a decision

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.