The navigation menu on a website is similar to the road signs on a street or other place where you find a direction to walk and proceed. It is not possible to reach an exact location until and unless you exactly know where you are. Similarly, navigation in web design is very crucial and plays a major role in a website’s usability as well as on the user experience.
The websites that we come across today display plenty of different types of navigation menus with some interesting, creative and fresh designs. However, it becomes difficult to determine the effectiveness of the navigation on a website, what would it look like; how should it look like? Let’s look at some tweaks to provide better navigation to your website.
Information Architecture
Designing for better navigation starts with having a proper information architecture. So, It becomes vital to think and decide the information architecture of your website. You need to prioritize your information, based on the features of your website. It is most important to study what can be placed at the bottom and what can be highlighted on the top based on your information hierarchy. Information architecture also includes features, user requirements, sitemaps, testing and wireframes.
Use Simple And User-Friendly Words
It is safe to use simple, commonly-used words and terms that are easy to figure out than to use technical or complicated words in your navigation menu. Any link on your website that makes it difficult for users to perceive or takes more than a second or two to make out, should not be used.
Standardize The Navigation
Standardizing means having the same navigation model throughout your website. It is necessary because without having a consistent design, a user may perceive the information as if he is on some another website.
Let User Know Where They Are
The visitor of your website must know where they are on the website. This can be achieved by changing the background of the link, the color of the page or by turning the text bold in the navigation menu to make sure that it is different from other links
Using Web-Conventions
It is all about simple, easy-to-use and intuitive website navigation. Web convention is another way that makes it a lot easier for designers to work around their designs. These are certain rules that need not to be defined alternatively. Mostly, users are familiar with such web conventions like, one would click on the website logo to get back to the homepage so design your logo with a homepage link.
Oodles studio is one of the leading design companies that specializes in web and mobile apps designing. We have expert team to deliver our clients with best in class projects comprising of well visual and interactive designs that help organisations boost their business.
