Navigation is an inherent part of all communications, and has also become a central component in many of the electronic devices we use today.
Most books and publications use indexes, page titles, page numbers, and tables of contents. Your mobile phone uses text, icons and buttons. Even your TV, the most pervasive form of communication, has a navigation system, from a basic remote control to sophisticated on-screen menus.
Navigation systems are all around us in the world too: the best designed airport quickly causes confusion without effective maps and signage.
Navigation is a vital element in the design of an effective website, and is a crucial consideration when redesigning an existing site. Often, poor site structure and a poor navigation shame are a central reason for people not using a site as easily (and therefore positively) as they should.
So how do we define a good navigation scheme? It's easy to think that navigation is all about menu bars and drop-downs, but effective navigation depends on much more than a good menu system.
At its most basic level, the role of a navigation scheme is to help a customer find their way around the hierarchy of a website quickly and easily: to get to what they want without confusion. Even at this level most sites fail to deliver, hiding poorly considered structure behind beautifully-styled menus.
The next step is to ensure that customers always know where they are and how to retrace their steps (the 'back' button is still the most widely used navigation device on the internet).
In most sites, that's where the navigation system ends. Customers can find things (if they're lucky), and find their way back again. And in most cases, this will make site work adequately. People will accept it and get on with it.
Creating a really successful navigation scheme demands a much more comprehensive approach: focusing much more on active assistance.
A good first step is to consider carefully what each type of customer is likely to need or be interested in. We use customer profiling and journey mapping techniques to inform this process, but even at a basic level it should be obvious where there is content on a site that is closely related to other content. Simply providing links to related information can dramatically reduce a customer's need to use top-level navigation.
In the same way, grouping related sets of information into dynamic customer-centric indexes or gateway pages can achieve two objectives: customers will find it easier to locate content directly relevant to them; and you have the opportunity to highlight content you want them to see.
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