Before you invest in navigation design
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Before you spend anything on navigation design, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
Prerequisites
- You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
- Someone owns it after the work is done
- Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable
- You have a way to tell whether it worked
The mistakes we see most
Label links by what people want, not by your org chart. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
A visible current-page state prevents visitors getting lost. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
In practice
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about navigation design before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.