Breaking the navigation habit
Habits are hard to break. You do something long enough and it becomes second nature. You don’t think about it, you just do it. You lose sight of whether or not it’s important, or whether or not you even need it. That’s how I feel about site navigation and I’m tired of it.
Obviously, you can’t get rid of site navigation but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I see more sites hiding navigation behind the hamburger icon and it doesn’t bother…at least when the site promotes navigation through content.
Guiding visitors with content is not particularly difficult to do — it happens naturally, really — but even then I still throw up a site header with navigation and logo.
Done. Normal. Wrong?
In many ways I’m sure I (maybe we) just see it as good usability. There’s nothing wrong with your “standard” header and navigation, it does the job. But if navigation doesn’t need to be focus, it doesn’t need to be the focus, right? People aren’t at your site to navigate, they’re there to do, buy, read, share or whatever. Navigation is secondary at best, it needs to be guide and little more.
We’ve all been reading “content first” for years now, and while I agree with it and believe in it, it’s another thing entirely to shake conventions I’ve been using for 15 years. It’s easy to read and understand a concept but another thing to put it into practice. I was working on a site and kept struggling to figure out how to best organize the navigation and then it hit me — why am I worrying about this so much?
I don’t believe this is a case of “it’s difficult so lets hide the problem,” I really believe it’s a case of “I can do better.” And it’s not necessarily being better at navigation, it’s being better at organizing content to be that navigation. Yes, it’s about identifying what navigation elements are important and which aren’t, but more so it’s really thinking about what each page needs to do…and that something probably isn’t “click on a navigation option and go here.”
