Design theory: The complexity of website navigation design

When it comes to navigation, everyone is not unfamiliar, such as Amazon's tab navigation, site map, menu navigation in software, index tables, and so on. The navigation design looks very simple: nothing more than a few links on the page where users can browse and use the entire site. This is not true, navigation design is very complex and rigorous. Below we take the website navigation as an example superficial analysis the complexity of the navigation design:

Task: Design a website navigation

Objective: 1, to provide users with a convenient way to jump between the pages
2, can express the relationship between the page, the page and the content

Analysis: People instinctively have a sense of space. Imagine you're sitting on your couch watching TV, and suddenly there's a visitor, which direction are you going to go? Is your high school friend sitting in front of you or behind you? Don't ask everyone to answer it quickly.
Also, when designing the site navigation, be sure to tell the caller clearly "where they are" and "where they can go."
Users need to know their location in the site information space, we also want to help users create a sense of the site space, through our design of the navigation system. (It's called a navigation system because it's impossible to accomplish a goal by just one navigation mode)

Design: Provide a complete navigation system, including global navigation, local navigation, auxiliary navigation, context navigation, remote navigation

Global Navigation:
A set of key points from the final page of the site to other pages, wherever you want to go, can be reached in the global navigation.

Local navigation:
Provide a page of the parent, brother, child level of access, is the user in the site information space to the nearby location of the access. The design of local navigation will directly affect the quality of the whole navigation system.

Secondary navigation:
Provides a quick way for global navigation and related content that can not be quickly reached by local navigation. The user moves the browsing direction without having to start over from scratch.

Contextual Navigation:
When users are reading the text, it is precisely when they need context-sensitive information. Accurately understand the needs of users and provide links to them when they read (for example, text links) more efficiently than users using search and global navigation. The schematic diagram of context navigation is similar to the auxiliary navigation, which is no longer drawn here.

Friendly navigation:
Some of the links that users don't normally use can help users quickly and efficiently when they really need them. Examples include contact information, feedback forms, and legal notices.

Remote navigation:
Navigation that exists independently of the way. For example, site map: Concise, single page of the overall structure of the site display. Many times he chooses a site map when the user is disoriented by your other navigation.

Through the above navigation design, we can see that a complete navigation system design is very complex and rigorous.