Coordinate Menus with User Tasks

Use understandable link labels. Figure out what users are looking for, and use category labels that are familiar and relevant. Menus are not the place to get cute with made-up words and internal jargon. Stick to terminology that clearly describes your content and features.

Make link labels easy to scan. You can reduce the amount of time users need to spend reading menus by left-justifying vertical menus and by front-loading key terms.

For large websites, use menus to let users preview lower-level content. If typical user journeys involve drilling down through several levels, mega-menus (or traditional drop-downs) can save users time by letting them skip a level (or two).

Despite their widespread use, drop down menus suffer poor usability. Andy Crestodina writes that avoiding drop down menus is good for two reasons :

- Drop down menus can be difficult for search engines to crawl.

- Drop down menus encourage users to skip important pages.

Mega menus, on the other hand, are more user-friendly because they are:

- Bigger

- Divided into contextual groups

- Visible at once

Good navigation design can :

Enhance a user’s understanding

Give them confidence using your product

Provide credibility to a product

Sometimes known as secondary navs, subnavs explicitly direct users to the pages that are considered less prominent than their parent pages in the main nav. A subnavigation often becomes necessary for sites with quite a few pages

During my research, I learned a few things to note when creating a navigation:

1. Your navigation should be well-structured and simple.

The point of navigation is to help users find what they’re looking for in the site — without stress AND without leaving the experience. What I’m emphasizing is that in a good nav, users don’t rely on the browser’s back button to get around. This is an important guiding principle: Users should never have to hit the back button.

2. Make it clear.

Not only should the language used on the navigation be clear, but any icons used also need to be clear. You may need to pair the word “Menu” with the menu icon, depending on the audience (on an agency site the hamburger can stand alone, but on a university’s website, it may not).

3. It’s all about context.

Always think about your user persona, think about the goals they have when visiting your site, and use your navigation to help them meet those goals. If the navigation is confusing to them, their goals won’t be met.

https://www.justinmind.com/blog/navigation-design-almost-everything-you-need-to-know/​​​​​​​