Best practice website navigation

We were recently asked to review a website for usability. One of the key pieces the client wanted to look at was navigation. Surprisingly, there’s not a huge amount available on the web about this. Even Jakob Nielsen, the guru of website usability is pretty quiet on the subject. So we pulled together a few thoughts and rules of thumb when it comes to creating a good website navigation:

Website users go to websites with goals in mind and perform tasks in order to achieve these goals. Information seeking is one of the most common goals on websites and especially intranets. Navigation is the primary tool for in-site information seeking. A good navigation makes for fast and successful information seeking.

Website navigation has undergone much standardisation over the years. Navigation bars, drop-down menus and sub-navigations are found across most sites, as are standard labels such as “home”, “about”, “contact us”, etc. Users sub-consciously expect sites to adhere to these standards. If sites don’t follow these standards, information seeking can be greatly impaired.

Secondary navigations (not to be confused with sub-navigations) are often missed and confuse users as to the categorisation, structure and priority of information presented.

Navigation labels should use concise and common language as this aids information seeking. Jargon should be avoided.

If you’ve got any any other navigation tips to add, please drop us a comment.

New draft of web accessibility guidelines

New Media Knowledge (NMK) reports that the second edition of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are in preparation and a draft version has been released.

The guidelines are intended to help web developers and content creators make their sites as accessible to visitors with disabilities (for example the partially-sighted) as they are to anybody else.

NMK has plenty of nice things to say about the new guidelines, praising the fact that they use real-life examples and list common failures.

But they also rightly criticise the “verbose and jargon-filled language”, the excessive use of links, and the sheer quantity of material. What webmaster in their right minds is going to read something over five hundred pages long, not to mention the pages of annexes and additional material on the W3C site?

Website accessibility is a good aim. So far it hasn’t been put into practice by the vast majority of site owners. The complexity of the guidelines is one reason for this, and this second edition seems likely to take us no further forward.

David Harbottle