The simpler your main navigation the better. Web Usability experts have found that your site visitors will look at the content of the web page first, then at logos, tag lines and any numbered or bulleted lists. If they don’t find anything of interest, they are likely to click the Back Button. If they find something of interest, most likely it will be a link within the main content of the page. Only then, if they feel lost, they will look at your main navigation.
Do not expect your site visitors to use your main tabs (navigation links) as the main way to navigate your website. The main purpose of the navigation is to help a visitor to get back to one of your main pages if they get lost in your site.
The home page is one of the most important pages to have a link to on your navigation bar. This should be the first tab in your navigation, and it should be called “Home”. Since most good sites are already designed this way, users are used to it, and if they want to start over, they will try to locate it exactly there.
Navigation tab names should be short and specific. Meaningless or generic sounding titles such as “More Information” or cool sounding made up words must be avoided at any cost. When a user reads the navigation tab, she should be able to know right away what information she should expect to see when she clicks on it. By the way this is true for any link in your website – by reading its title one should expect what she will see after she clicks on the link. In usability lingo, it said that the link has good “information smell”. Navigation menu tabs should always have great information smell.
In the ideal case you will have no more than 6 navigation tabs, including the Home tab. The more tabs you crowd on the navigation bar, the harder you make it for users to choose and locate the meaningful ones. This is especially true for smaller websites. If your website contains a lot of information you may have to have a few extra tabs with the understanding that they should be very specifically and unambiguously named. I would never ever go over 10 (short, extremely well named ones).
Drop down menus can be useful for websites containing a lot of information. However, if your site is relatively small, avoid having drop down menus – chances are that few users will click them. If you need to use drop-down menus we recommend that you have only one level in the hierarchy. If you have more than one level, our experience shows that visitors who dare drilling down, will get frustrated easily. Part of the frustration also comes from the fact that if their mouse goes outside of the fly-out menu, the entire menu and sub-menu disappears and they have to restart the process of drilling down all over again.
If you have drop-down menus, make sure that each main navigation tab links to a page when clicked. For example if your main tab is called “Products” and its fly out menu has sub-items “Kitchen Appliances”, “Home Electronics” and “Car Electronics”, make sure that when someone clicks on “Products” they get to a page, form within which they can navigate to any of the three sub-categories. This is necessary because many people, including experiences users like myself, many times click on a main navigation tab. In addition some browsers fail to display the fly-out menus.
Remember: Your visitors do not care about your information layout, i.e. how you have structured your site’s navigation. They will naturally follow what is interesting to them, mostly by reading the content, and clicking on links within it.
In summary here are a few tips for effective site navigation:
- “Home”should always be present, and be the first tab
- Have no more than 6 tabs
- The tab names should be short and specific
- Have only 1 sub-level in your hierarchy if using fly-out menus
- Make the main tab link to a page if using fly-out menus
- Concentrate your time and budget on your content within the pages – place links generously within your text to other pages on your website.