Navigation placement is very important. People want to be familiar with the presentation and are unwilling to put effort into learning a new navigation system. Therefore using classic navigation design templates is a must. Either putting your navigation structure on the left or putting a global navigation bar at the top are both familiar and effective ways to communicate your navigation structure to you site visitors.

Putting your navigation bar on the side is a good place to put it, because it breaks up the width of your sentences. The eye can comfortably read 60 – 70 characters. It’s done at a subconscious level, but humans love reading in ways they are familiar with. Whether you know it or not, you like certain font styles, you like certain spacing, you like certain line length and so on. Unfortunately many websites don’t take into consideration readability. Some real estate website designs span their paragraphs across the entire length of a user’s browser, others cram their sentences into a 30 character space. It’s important that you try to keep it within the readable 60-70 character length.

Another important usability feature to take into consideration are the user navigation paths. Often users won’t land on the most desirable page within your website containing the information they are looking for. As we spoke about before, more often than not, a user will click on the back button and try another search in the search engine. However, with proper “guided navigation” you can direct your viewers to supplementary information, alternative sales pages and the “buy now” button. However, even if your goal is to help guide them to their final destination, this process should take no more than 3 clicks. This is a particularly important rule to remember when your trying to guide your user into interaction with your website (i.e. to sign up for a newsletter, contact you for more information etc). These lead generations need to be no more than 3 clicks away from any page, but if possible try making it only one click away.

There is a lot of debate around the three click rule. Some argue that users will keep clicking as long as they feel they are on the right track. Therefore as long you as you continue ensuring them they are on the right track they will continue clicking. However, I feel that even if a user has the patience to wait 9 clicks until they get where they want to go, why not make the content more easily accessible. Therefore whether the three click rule deserves as much merit as it receives is beyond the realm of this report. That being said, I feel like it is a great starting point to ensure you are designing and efficient and user friendly web site.

You can ensure you have an easily usable website by ensuring your primary (global) navigation and your secondary (local navigation / footer links / embedded links etc) are placed in proper well organized places and are easy to read and understand from a user’s perspective.

Likewise, as I stated before, not all users will have landed on the most desirable page in terms of addressing their needs. For this reason a system of recommended or guided navigation structures need to be implemented. This helps minimize the user’s chance of clicking the back button. Instead, if you show them that the information they are looking for resides somewhere else in your website, they are likely to take a look around. You can do this by using a bread crumb trail or a list of “recommend” or “similar” articles. However, it is important to note that you should never use “click here” as the link bait to get people to click. Try using more descriptive terms. This will help both your click through ratio and it will also help you in the search engines since a descriptive link will be recognized as an anchor tag and search engines will give you “points” for using your keywords in your internal links.

Your navigation plan will change the look and feel of your website. So it’s also important to take your design elements into consideration and ask not only what works the best, but what looks the best with your current design system. For this reason it helps greatly to build a navigation action plan to determine both the goals and needs of your audience as well as sort out any design compatibility issues with the rest of your site. In your navigation action plan you need to ensure that your navigation is aligned with the rest of your site goals. Good navigation needs to do the following

Provides already understood structures and looks familiar
Remains consistent throughout your entire site
Can be monitored through your metrics monitoring program (visitor paths)
Links that appear in context
Guided links (recommend other similar or popular pages to your site visitors)
Provides clear messages
Supports visitors goals and behaviors

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