5 more things to make your navigation user friendly
Following on from our last article ‘5 things to make your navigation user friendly’ we have a further five points to share. This subject is one of our favourites and is a key part of every project we take on.
Understanding the needs of your users to create clear direction and structure on your website and product will save your users and teams time and stress. Getting it right will increase the independence of your users, meaning less time contacting support to find information or asking how to carry out a task.
Below, we have 5 more points on how to create this independent user behaviour.
Hamburgers, only if you have too
We were in two minds whether to post this one, but we believe it's valid to include. Hamburger navigations should only be used if really necessary. The pattern is commonly used but it does remove opportunities to add extra meaning to the role of your website as we mentioned in a previous article under ‘Supporting information labels for navigation links’.
By using a hamburger menu on the desktop version of your website you are hiding information scents that can add meaning and also make users needlessly work harder to navigate to areas of your product.
Make key journeys prominent
User journeys are crafted with detail to keep users on task while enjoying the experience of interacting with your application. This can sometimes get lost when moving through to the design phase of a project because a UI could be too subtle in fear of breaking the design balance of a particular screen. We appreciate the design of applications and websites, it is our expertise after all, but there needs to be a balance between beautiful design and clearly showing the next step in a journey or a clear call to action.
Remember to make sure the main action you would like users to take stands out, whether that's a ‘Book now’, ‘Get in touch’ or ‘Next’ button on a form. When looking at more conversion based actions consider supporting the call to action with additional information, whether that's a marketing message or statistic to catch and engage the users attention.
Order your navigation links for users
Consider when organising your navigation, what is the most important need of your user. What do they want to do first or need to know first before moving forward? Make sure that action is the first link in your navigation to save your users having to scan the navigation to look for it.
Once that hierarchy of needs is considered, can your navigation reflect this? This should then be considered when working through the content of your website, especially when getting into secondary navigations and supporting components.
Keep key information and call to actions above the fold
We have found over numerous projects that users don’t necessarily scroll websites. In most cases, they don’t scroll past the landing section, or what is known as ‘Past the fold’ which is at the bottom of your browser window.
Because of this, you need to design the main call to actions and key information for that page to be above the fold to help users quickly understand where they are, the information they have found and the next action they need to take.
You can analyse the lack of scrolling if you install services like Hotjar, Lucky Orange or Crazy Egg and use their heatmap features.
Test new navigations before launching
When designing a new navigation for your product or website, we would always recommend that you test the changes via Tree Testing. Tree testing will allow you to test the organisation of your content and how you label it. Via a series of tasks you can set, it will allow you to see first hand whether new structures and labelling match with your users understanding and whether they get lost.
This is one of the main tests we always look to carry out for websites that contain a large amount of content that users need to find on a regular basis.
In conclusion
A user centred approach to design will make sure you create navigation and experiences that are easy for your users to understand. Following these and previous ideas we have shared will give you a starting point on how you take your user research and start implementing it across your product.
Even if you haven’t carried out user research (which we would always highly recommend doing), you can take some of these points into your design decisions to at least implement some best practices while you wait to carry out your user research.
Need some help?
Book in a FREE 30 minute session with our UX Director, Jason Hancock.
