You Can’t Use What You Can’t Find – The Importance of Good Navigation Design
Well constructed, easy to use navigation is of the utmost importance when establishing integrity, authority, and trust in your website. Navigation conveys the scope and character of what your site contains and offers, it gives your site clarity and helps set user expectations early on. To my eyes (I’m a UI designer), good navigation design represents the absolute corner stone of good web design, if you don’t get it right, it doesn’t matter how pretty or how much cutting edge technology it harnesses, your site will ultimately fail.
Badly designed navigation on your site can have serious consequences on how your organisation is perceived, and how much interest/revenue it can generate online. All too frequently potential customers/subscribers/users are lost due to unnecessary frustration caused by their inability to quickly and easily accomplish their specific goals. Generally web users are a fickle bunch, if your site isn’t providing the answers, they’ll look else were.
Ultimately, your organisation has goals. Your site has goals. You want visitors to sign up for your service, read your content, see affiliates ads, shop, or perhaps even convince them to better themselves or others in some way. These I’m sure you’ll agree are all very (or at least should be) achievable goals, but how can your user fulfil these goals if they can’t find the content which empowers them to do so? Short answer, they can’t. So, what steps can be taken to make sure that you get your navigation right? Firstly it’s important to ask yourself these questions;
- Why is the site being built? / Why was the site built?
- Who is the intended audience of the site?
- How should the content be structured?
- How are users going to get to the content?
- What is the most efficient way to get them there?
- What does the navigation give access to?
Figuring out the answers to some of these questions can be problematic, particularly if your site is big/information rich, in fact providing access to information on large sites is far more complex than one might initially presume. For this reason it is imperative to seek out the services of a reputable digital agency that can help/guide/advise you; An agency with a team who have a keen understanding of Information architecture, Usability and User Centred design. An agency like Wiliam.
Getting it Right – the Wiliam Way
Getting it right, particularly for large scale ecommerce solutions takes experience, and necessarily touches on many disciplines. At Wiliam we harness the experience and knowledge of our Creative, IA and Usability gurus. We don’t just create a row of pretty buttons at the top of the page and hope the user can find his/her own way around the site, we balance a range of factors into a unified system that support the goals of the site and the visitors.
This divergence of skill sets allows us to understand the people who will be using your site and what they are tiring to accomplish. Ultimately we make their experience of your site enjoyable, we make your content easy to find, we give your site’s content context and, we would hope, help improve users perception of your business along with improving your bottom line .
