Navigation design for small teams
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Most advice about navigation design assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.
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.
What to keep
Seven or fewer top-level items keeps a menu scannable. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
What to drop
Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.
How we handle it
A visible current-page state prevents visitors getting lost. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What this looks like day to day
The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. 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.