Website Design Guideline #5: Keeping Navigation Intuitive, Persistent and Consistent

ARTICLE SNIPPET - While Persistent Navigation is Now Rather Common, Site Owners Mustn't Become Complacent. Users Must be Crystal Clear About Where They Are, Where They Can Go and How they Can Get Back to Somewhere They've Been.

Usability and design are two key factors in publishing great websites. You may have a clear strategy and great content, but if your site is unusable and unattractive, it will be difficult for users to find what they're looking for, difficult for you to get users to do what you want them to do and difficult to get users to become loyal customers and revisit again and again.

Creating user-friendly websites begins by following the 14 Mequoda Website Design Guidelines for successful website design. By reviewing a site's score for each of the 14 items, along with the overall average score, the areas of the site that operate well, and those that need work, become evident.

In this chapter of Website Design for Publishers and Authors, we take a close look at Guideline # 5: Keeping Navigation Intuitive, Persistent and Consistent.

• Persistent navigation is the simple concept of ensuring that the navigation to complete an online activity is the same experience each time that the user returns to the site to pursue that activity.
• Five years ago this was a real problem, as site navigation changed frequently. As a result, the user was constantly lost or having to figure out how the website worked.
• A website is really an interactive piece of software.
• The navigation facilitates user goals of: 1) easily accessing content, community and commerce and 2) finding any desired feature or information page.
• The site should be straightforward, relatively simple to use and unchanging—with no surprises or misleading cues, such as design elements that look like links but instead are static graphics.

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