Navigation design, explained without the jargon

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Here is navigation design without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

Label links by what people want, not by your org chart. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

A reasonable first step

A visible current-page state prevents visitors getting lost. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

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.