Three myths about navigation design
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few things about navigation design that get repeated more often than they get checked.
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
“It only matters for big sites”
Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
“We can deal with it after launch”
Sometimes true, usually expensive. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.
“Our platform handles it”
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.
The short version
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
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.