Website navigation has become increasingly important since most people get their information about your business or service on-line. The navigation part can make or break the experience of your visitors. Since you want the experience of visitors to your site to be positive and easy, it’s important to understand the ways in which to elevate the user experience.
What kind of an audience are you hoping to attract? Will your users know what they are looking for before they visit your site, or will they be seeking additional information? Is your website user an expert or a novice? It is a challenge to create an interface that serves two different groups. You don’t want your site visitors to have to dig through irrelevant content to find what they are looking for, because chances are, they won’t dig very deep. To help with this challenge, divide your links into two. Creating separate website navigation menus for different audiences is a win-win solution.
If site search is an important part of the user experience on your site, make sure that the search bar is easy to use and prominently displayed. People who use the search bar are usually on the website for a specific reason with intent to act or buy. If this is the case, you are wanting to provide ease and everything user friendly. You want to make sure they are able to find what they are looking for without any issues. You want site searching to be clean, easy and effective for your users. Ease of use and searchability is incredibly important.
Sometimes there is a lot of information in your drop-down menus. If this is the case, these menus can become too complex or overwhelming for the user. Plus, you don’t want to have to sacrifice valuable information to make everything fit. Drop down menus should help the user navigate your site, not add to confusion or frustration. If the options in the drop-down menus are too extensive, consider replacing this information with a detailed page. Instead of shoving all the applicable information into a drop-down menu, create an entire page of the categories you offer. It will clean things up and alleviate stress and frustration on the part of your visitors.
It’s important to make considerations for mobile website’s navigation. These days, people expect the mobile user experience to be just as good, if not easier than on a desktop. Think through what things you can do to make the mobile experience easier and user friendly. Try to eliminate unnecessary options, because the muddier or confusing the options are, the more negative the user experience will be. If you provide users with a highly responsive, optimized navigation bar, you will have a happy user that will likely return to your site, whether on their desktop or mobile device.
If you have several categories that are specific to your industry, be sure to provide the needed context to your visitors. If you use confusing definitions in your navigation menu, you are going to turn people away. But if the verbiage is an important part of your website, provide users with additional indicators to understand what you are offering. For example, you could provide small pictures of categories and subcategories to provide context. If you don’t want to use pictures, use colors to help the navigation process. You could also use an icon or link to further enlighten the user. Anything you can do to provide simplicity, especially if your website is confusing, is helpful. You want people to find the right thing in the most effective and easiest way possible.
Order is important. Be strategic in the way you order things on your site. There is something called the serial position effect, which shows that people tend to recall items when they are the first and the last items on a list. The serial position effect describes how our memory is affected by the position of information in a sequence. Often people have a hard time remembering items in the middle of a series but have an easier time remembering the first and the last items. In your design, it’s important to take this into consideration and place your most important information at the beginning and end of your menu. Keep this in mind as you choose placements for things you specifically want to market and sell.
Website navigation is one area where you should consider repeating content. If one or more of your pages fits into more than one category, you should list it in both. You want people to be able to find what they are looking for, but you can’t always predict how or where they will look. You don’t want to “talk down” to your customers, or spend time and money repeating content, but if your categories or labels can include more than one search, put it in both places. Usability testing would be a good idea in determining the user tendencies, and how the common user may try to search or navigate your content.
How many people have ever visited a website, looked around for information they needed, and then went straight to the footer to find the information they were looking for? I think this happens quite a bit. It is easy to put all our effort into designing the things that our users will initially see when visiting our site, only to forget how important a footer can be. Most of the time, a website’s footer is just as important as its header. While there are many important elements you can add to your website’s footer, each one should serve a unique purpose. You could include such things as a map or address, email sign-up, your mission statement, tags and categories, awards and certifications, testimonials, upcoming events, contact information or a call to action. Whatever you decide to include, don’t think of your footer as an afterthought. It can contain valuable information and may be the place where your user goes first.
It’s important to include strong branding elements. In an effort to make the site a pleasant and effective experience, think about pleasing colors, fonts and overall design. Creating an effective navigation strategy should include strong design elements and involving a creative designer.
Keep these things in mind as you work to create an effective navigation strategy and a positive and helpful experience for your site visitors.