Five mistakes teams make with navigation design
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit navigation design.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Warning signs
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable
- Label links by what people want, not by your org chart
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
A visible current-page state prevents visitors getting lost. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Turning this into a decision
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
- Label links by what people want, not by your org chart — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.