Essential Navigation Checklists for Web Design

These checklists pull together best practice in the disciplines of information design, usability and accessibility, into an easy to apply format. If you are already familiar with those topics, the checklists serve as a handy reminder that is easy to refer to and apply when planning navigation. If unfamiliar it's also a fast-track lesson - providing you with a head-start in getting it right and enables you to make better informed choices / compromises.

You are presented with the top level practical advice you would take away from reading about each area in depth. I don't give detailed reasoning behind all the advice because that would be five books' worth of material in itself, and a number of excellent books already exist that do this perfectly well – see the reading list at the end of this article.

The Ultimate Test of Your Navigation Design

You will find a compilation of best practices and insights derived from research and personal experience, but as with all check points you should apply them judiciously. Good websites come from good compromises. The ultimate test of any user interface design is always the user test. This means it is okay to dismiss guidelines if the end result is proven to be a comfortable user experience where the users can carry out tasks / find information with the minimum of effort.

Steve Krug in his excellent book 'Don't Make Me Think' (review) includes some very useful chapters that will inspire and empower you to do your own user testing. Testing is neither costly, nor too time consuming but essential, as you’ll discover as soon as you do some. I stress this because for navigation to work, before even considering design or technology, your users must understand the words used and have their expectations from those words met by the content they click/link to. All you need for this test is the navigational words in the order they would appear on a piece of paper, and a few people representative of the target audience. Ask what they understand by each word/phrase and what they’d expect to get if they clicked on that link.

Checklists

The guidance for navigation planning is organised as follows:

• Planning the Information Architecture
  • Content Ideas
  • Choice of Words/Phrases
  • Structure
  • Helpful Tips
• Planning the In-Page Navigation
  • Choice of Words/Phrases
  • Structure