Navigation That Doesn't Make People Think

Nobody visits a website or opens an app to admire its navigation. They want something, and navigation either gets them there or gets in the way. Good information architecture is invisible. Bad information architecture is often the reason people leave.

Organise around your users' words, not your org chart

A very common mistake is structuring a product the way the company is organised internally. Visitors don't know your departments. They know what they're trying to do.

• Use the words your users use. If customers say "pricing", don't call it "plans and packages".
• Group things by task, not by which team owns them.
• If you're unsure, ask a handful of real users to sort your pages into groups. Patterns appear quickly.

Keep top-level choices few and distinct

Every extra menu item makes every other item a little harder to find. Aim for a short top-level menu where each label is clearly different from the rest. "Services" and "Solutions" side by side force people to guess.

Labels should be specific. "Resources" could mean anything. "Guides" and "Case studies" say exactly what's behind them.

How do people know where they are?

Wayfinding answers three questions at a glance: where am I, how did I get here, and where can I go next?

• highlight the current section in the menu
• use breadcrumbs on deeper pages
• make page titles match the link that led to them

That last one is easy to miss. If someone clicks "Mobile app development" and lands on a page titled "Our capabilities", there's a moment of doubt about whether they're in the right place.

Design for the second visit too

First-time visitors explore. Returning users want shortcuts. Search, recently viewed items and sensible defaults help people who already know what they need.

Mobile menus deserve their own design

A desktop menu squeezed into a hamburger icon isn't a mobile design. On a phone, work out what people need most often and keep it within easy reach, which in apps often means a bottom bar. Put the rest behind a clear menu, not behind three levels of nested lists.

Test by watching, not asking

Ask someone to find a specific thing and watch where they tap first. First clicks tend to be telling: people who start down the wrong path rarely recover quickly. A few sessions like this reveal more than any amount of internal debate.

Clear structure is where our product design work begins, before a single screen is styled.