Navigation Design

Ease of Use

In the web world today users want to know what they are going to get when they click on a page and if it will have the information they are looking for on it. They also want to get from one page to another then back to the first one without having to use the back button a few times, when they don’t find what they needed on a page. There are a few simple things web designers can do to aid users in the process.

Breadcrumbs

Remember Hansel and Gretel? They left breadcrumbs along the path they took so that they could find their way home again later on. This isn’t exactly the same as Web site breadcrumbs but close. By making a small line of navigation links (usually at the top of the page) that show the user the current page they are on and the pages above the current page in the hierarchy. This allows the user within one click to navigate to any number of pages with just one click.

Page Titles = Link Name = First Headline

If a user clicks on a link that says Info and the page they are taken to has a list of informational links, but the user thought they were getting info about a certain topic then we as designers have not done our jobs. It only makes sense to make everything correspond so that the user knows where they are, where they are going and what they will find there. If the name of the page is info, the link that got to that page was labeled info, and the very first think the user sees on that page says info, then nobody is confused and everyone is happy. It also helps a lot for SEO and for keeping track of page names and files in the backend of things.