According to a recent survey, 94% of website visitors rated ease-of-navigation as the primary feature. Here are some suggestions on how your company’s easy navigation web design can deliver the optimal user experience possible.
Instead of using icons for nautical items, using actual text is better for search engines and easier for visitors.
Hypertext
The Internet is a dynamic medium with many moving parts coming together to form its entirety. Website content is organised using a hypertext markup language (HTML), which enables visitors to navigate by clicking links leading to other pages or sites on the Internet.
As much as this easy navigation web design system may work effectively, visitors may find it jarring or unfamiliar. Therefore, some websites use non-traditional styles when designing hyperlinks – for instance, using colours not present elsewhere on the page and not underlining or bolding text when users roll over it. Some more advanced sites also utilise more complicated techniques, like having a red dashed outline with text that expands upon hovering.
Make your links easy for visitors to recognise by using consistent styles across your site navigation elements and links on every page, so they know which type of information they’ll get when clicking any link. Doing this ensures they know what kind of data they can expect when clicking any link.
Another way to make your site’s navigation clearer is to employ actual text instead of icons whenever possible. Icons might look stylish, but search engines cannot read them and could frustrate visitors due to extra loading times; too many icons will slow down page speed, negatively impacting SEO.
Streamlined Navigation Bars
Website navigation bars are an integral component of web design that can increase user engagement and overall usability on any website. By offering clear and easily understandable navigation bar labels, they will keep visitors on your website longer, decrease bounce rates and boost conversion rates.
Navigation bars come in various forms. A horizontal one that runs along the top of your site’s page is one popular solution and is particularly helpful when dealing with sites containing lots of content – providing visitors with an easily navigable pathway through it all.
Another form of navigation menu is a sidebar menu that runs along the side of your page, sitting to one side and providing more compact access to various pages, products or services, or an open search bar.
Descriptive Labels
Labelling navigation items on a website is essential to creating an excellent user experience. By providing visitors with descriptive labels that make understanding what content and functionality will be available easy, intuitive website navigation increases user satisfaction while decreasing bounce rates and increasing conversions.
Some websites feature confusing navigation with words that are hard for visitors to understand. For instance, using terms like “Products”, “Services”, and “Solutions” on a homepage may make sense within a business. Still, it may be misleading for customers looking for more information about offerings from that business. One solution could be conducting online card sorting exercises such as those for creating clarity with descriptive labels.
Overly complex navigation items are an often-made mistake that leads to confusion and frustration for users who lack the time or energy to sort through options irrelevant to their needs. Furthermore, keeping navigation menus as concise as possible helps improve website loading speed – essential to increasing user experience and decreasing bounce rates. Again, noting which order your navigation items appear is also crucial, as research indicates they tend to be remembered more.
Order Matters
It’s essential that the order of your navigation items logically reflects users’ expectations and mental models of users, which requires research, user testing, and A/B testing. Among these techniques is the Primacy Effect, which suggests items at the beginning are more easily remembered than those nearer the end. You should ensure important pages and sections appear first in your navigation bar to help users easily remember them.
Be sure to thoroughly test your easy navigation web design on mobile, especially given users’ shorter attention spans. Use Google Analytics to understand how visitors navigate your content and adjust as necessary.