How to find (and solve) navigation issues on your website

Making your navigation work harder 💪🏼

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There are many ways that your website can work wonderfully and of course, the converse is very true. There are lots of (simple) ways a website isn’t working as well or as hard as it can. Your website navigation is crucial to creating a brilliant user experience (UX). As well as being visible to search engine crawls, completing the circle by making your website more visible to potential visitors.

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You’ve got a strong homepage, it’s modern, clean, bright and tells your story just right. But your conversions just don’t seem to be happening? Have you considered your navigation? No, not only the menu at the top of your website, but your Information Architecture (IA) sitting in behind. And not just this, but how it is used, interacted with and navigated by your users?

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Even if you haven’t already identified an issue with your website it can be super valuable to test your usability regularly. Moments like; building a new website, adding, removing or structuring content can be times when navigation changes can impact how your website performs. And also can be a great instigator for testing and improving. There are some very effective tools to help with finding navigational issues, and with great data and insights shining the way to better sorting and ordering.

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What is website navigation? ╰┈➤

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Simply put, website navigation is the links within your website that connect the pages. The purpose is for your website visitors to find what they need on your site. And importantly it is also used by search engines to discover and index the content housed on your website.

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Search engines use links between pages to understand context and relationships between pages. Ultimately building a picture of what your website is about and who would want to see it, and why. 

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Whilst strong SEO is vital to finding users, it is always best to make sure your users come first. If your website only talks to search engines it is unlikely to really speak ‘human’ and do what it is intended, make conversions. Users first, search engines after.

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Let’s explore some common navigational issues and how great UX research can solve them.

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Your Information Architecture 🗺️

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Your website Information Architecture (IA) is always important to consider. How content is stored, ordered and found will impact the UX and the performance of your website SEO. Using a card sorting tool to research how users expect information and content to be sorted, stored and found can be vitally important to how effective your website is. Optimalsort is a quick and effective tool to establish where and how users expect information to be sorted.

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Building intuitive IA and making sure navigation, and menus are simple to follow will ensure your users are confident and comfortable making their way through your website. Understanding where they can find the information they need and progressing to the next step.

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As well as understanding the order of content with card sorting, combined with our tree-testing tool, Treejack, it can be incredibly useful to understand where users expect information to be found. Looking at how users interact with your website, where they look for information and where they get lost is all great stuff!

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Using these insights will keep them on your website longer, more likely to see the task through. And let’s not forget that search engines love it when your website is performing, keeping users longer with strong content that is seen as relevant.

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Content hierarchy 📝

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The order of your content is important. This can be how content is stored and the order of your navigation and creating intuitive IA. But can also be as simple as where navigational sign posts are. 

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It seems obvious, but there is a case for keeping the most important information at the top of drop down menus, and where you want users to take action, usually on your most important pages. Studies show that attention and retention are highest for things that appear at the beginning and at the end of lists.

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This is why ‘Contact’ should always be found at the top right corner, the last on the list and in a standard, expected location. Keeping this in mind when creating the order of your pages and what you want your users to interact with will inform your structure.

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How is your website used now 👨🏻💻

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Understanding exactly how your website is used currently and identifying areas that need to be improved will lead to much stronger user experience (UX). Usability testing should be an essential part of ongoing research for your website success.

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One of the biggest issues with website usability is building intuitive navigation. If your users can’t find their way through your website to complete a task, they’re not going to try too hard. They’re far more likely to abandon and find another website (organisation) that makes it easy. Great navigation should act as a simple to follow map from landing page through to task completion. 

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Using a research tool like Reframer can allow you to test how users complete tasks across your website. Following their journey from their first interaction through to task completion. The data will provide insights into how users engage, navigate and complete their tasks (or don’t). Where do they get stuck, lost or confused? How do they feel (even down to their body language)? How quickly can they find what they are looking for? And the next step?

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All great stuff to inform the design team to build an engaging, usable website.

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Homepage expectations 🤡

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Your users already have set expectations when they arrive on your website. They anticipate your website to look and behave in a regular way that makes navigation, and their decisions, easy. Simple design features, such as your navigation menu across the top of the page, with clear options. It is vital to make life simple and easy when it comes to navigating your website. 

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Creating an interface that looks clear, is easy and quick to follow will build trust and engagement quickly (remember the 2 second rule). Simple to follow navigation, including descriptive labels, can make completing tasks much simpler and quicker for your users. Guiding them smoothly through your website and ultimately to conversion.

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Confusing homepage navigation  🫣

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Your homepage is the hardest working page on your website. It’s the first place (most) users will interact with you and it is make or break. 

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Did you know? You have less than 2 seconds to grab users with a well designed, organised and simple homepage. If they don’t immediately know what to do, trust what they see and get started they will move on (to someone else).

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Increased bounce rate does the converse for your SEO. With a homepage that users bounce away from you are likely to see a drop in SEO rankings, meaning ultimately you will see less users!

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Did you know that 87% of people that find themselves on the right path after the first click will complete their task? Ensuring that when users land on your homepage they can clearly find the road signs, but not everything that your website contains. Your homepage should simply guide your user to navigate your site, know what to do and how to do it. 

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A cluttered, busy homepage with too many links will distract your users’ attention, confuse them and maybe even lose them forever! First-click testing will take an informative look at how your homepage interface is performing. Mapping where your user is clicking once they arrive on your homepage and conversely, where they are not engaging.

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This can all be highly informative in designing, re-designing or even removing clicks from the users journey through your homepage, and beyond. Using Chalkmark to test your users first clicks is a great way to get started now.

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Wrap up 🥙

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With a website that is intuitive to navigate and content that is relevant you will find users that are engaged and SEO that ranks!

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Get started quickly and simply with our range of tools to sort out your navigation.

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And, if you need some more inspiration to help improve your website navigation, grab yourself a copy of our Actionable IA guide that explores actionable ways to fix, refine and build better IAs.

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As information professionals, we work with the “stuff” of information in our everyday work. We search for information, we spend time analyzing and synthesizing it, and we carefully create and structure it. Whether you elicit information from users and stakeholders, explore large data sets, design ‘journeys’ or interfaces, or create information architectures, understanding the information you are using and creating as information can help you do your work better.

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Kat King, Business Intelligence Analyst at the University of Michigan Library, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about understanding exactly what information is, and where it is, in our work.

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In her talk, Kat uses simple examples to teach you to “see” the information around you and understand what makes something “information” in the context of working as a human to accomplish something.

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Kat King bio 🎤

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Kat King is an Information Architect interested in language, meaning, and the things we make. She currently works as a Business Intelligence Analyst for the University of Michigan Library.

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Contact Details:

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Email: Katalogofchaos@gmail.com

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Where is the information? 📍🗺️

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Information theory can be dense and jargon-filled, and discussions in academic texts can feel divorced from the practice of actually working with information. We’re all told that information architecture is much more than website navigation. So, what is it? IA has a reputation for being difficult to understand, and in her talk, Kat attempts to help us understand what it is, where the information is, and what is it that we’re doing when we use IA methods.

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Kat defines IA as “the practice of ensuring ontological alignment”. ‘Ontological’ relates to concepts, categories, properties, and relationships. ‘Alignment’ means arrangements into appropriate relative positions. Therefore, information architecture is “the practice of ensuring concepts, categories and their properties and relationships are arranged into appropriate relative positions.”

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To align information then, you need to begin by sorting it into concepts and categories, which is difficult because information can sometimes be “slippery and abstract”. Kat argues this is the real reason that IA is sometimes hard to wrap our heads around. So, getting to the heart of the question, what is information? 

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Kat defines information as “a patterned relationship between differences that reduces uncertainty”. The key word here is ‘differences’. The trick to understanding and taming information is to identify what is different about sets of information. The next trick is to identify consistencies between these differences.

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This can be a little confusing, so Kat uses the example of picking fruit. We tend to use color (the difference) to identify when fruit is ripe and sweet. We know for a fact that, at some point, the fruit will be at its sweetest and, while there is a scientific way of identifying this point, we have to use the information we have at our disposal instead i.e. the colour of the fruit. The skin of the fruit in this example is like an interface - allowing a flow of information from the fruit’s ripening process to our eyes.

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Information categories 🧺🧺🧺

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The relationship between the information described in the fruit example can be split into two categories. “Information 1” is a factual, objective description of when the fruit is ripe (i.e. the science of why the fruit is the color that it is right now), whereas our subjective observation, based on color, is “Information 2”.

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• Information 1: Matter and energy, and their properties and interactions i.e. the laws of physics and universal truth or rules

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Information 1 poses challenges for us because we have a narrow range of perception, attention, and aggregation, which means we, as humans, can’t possibly understand the laws of nature just by observing. We have evolved to be simple, efficient observers of what is important to us. In other words, we don’t need to understand everything in order to get things right. We see patterns and generalize. Going back to the fruit example – we only need to know the color of ripe fruit, not the exact chemistry of why it is ripe.

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• Information 2: This is Information 1 that is given meaning by humans. This is done via processing semantic information, or “differences and structures that create meaning for people”.

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We use semantic information by processing concepts, patterns, categories, mental models, and even language as inputs to form our understanding. As social animals, we tend to reinforce general ‘truths’ about things because we’re constantly cooperating using shared information. General ‘truths’ are good enough.

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Kat uses the following interaction to demonstrate the interplay of different information.

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• Person 1: If the raspberries look good, can you get some for me?
• Person 2: How can tell is they’re good?
• Person 1: Get the ones that are the most red.

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In this interaction, the different pieces of information can be broken down by category:

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• Semantic information = Words and concepts
• Information 1 = Meaningful signs
• Information 2 = Perceptible differences
• Real life information = Raspberries

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Using our ability to communicate and understand concepts (words “red”, “good”, and “raspberries”) helps us to understand Information 2 (processing the words and concepts to understand that a red berry is good”), which aligns with Information 1 (the evolutionary science and ongoing consistency of red/ripe berries being sweet) that helps us decide when processing all of this information.

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So, now that we understand a little more about information, how does this influence our roles as designers?

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Why it matters 👀

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Thanks to our individual lived experiences, people have many different inputs/concepts about things. However, Kat points out that we’re pretty good at navigating these different concepts/inputs.

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Take conversations, for example. Conversations are our way of getting a “live” alignment of information. If we’re not on the same page we can ask each other questions to ensure we’re communicating semantic information accurately. 

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When we start to think about technology and digital products, the interfaces that we design and code become the information that is being transmitted, rather than words in a conversation. The design and presentation become semantic information structures, helping someone to understand the information we’re putting forward. This highlights the importance of aligning the interface (structure and semantic information) and the users' ontology (concepts and categories). For the interface to work, IA practitioners and designers need to know what most people understand to be true when they interact with information, concepts, and categories. 

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We need to find some sort of stability that means that most users can understand what they need to do to achieve a goal or make a decision. To do this, we need to find common ground between the semantic information (that might vary between users) so that users can have successful Information 2 style interactions (i.e. absorbing and understanding the concepts presented by the interface).

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To wrap up, let’s remind ourselves that information architecture is “the practice of ensuring concepts, categories and their properties and relations are arranged into appropriate and relevant positions”. As IA practitioners and designers, it’s our job to ensure that concepts and categories are arranged in structures that can be understood by the nuance of shared human understanding and semantic information – not just in some physical diagram.

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We need to present stable, local structures that help to reduce uncertainty at the moment of interaction. If we don’t, the information flow breaks and we aren’t reducing uncertainty; instead, we create confusion and disappointing user interactions with our digital products. Making sure we present information correctly is important (and difficult!) for the success of our products – and for better or worse, it’s the work of information architecture! 

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According to Abby Covert, author, teacher and community leader in the field of information architecture (IA) : ‘IA is the way we arrange pieces of content to make sense when experienced as a whole. By this definition: there is information architecture in everything. Mindblown?’

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😮 (That’s a resounding yes from an IA rookie like me.)

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In this issue of CRUX we go in search of information architecture and have some surprising encounters in the worlds of emoji, elevators, walking tracks, games and more. We meet UX designers, developers, researchers and even a Senior Park Ranger. It seems you can have your ‘IA hat’ on without even realising it. That’s the power of information architecture.

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Some highlights from this issue:

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• UX research and strategy specialist, Q Walker explores the world of emoji from an information architecture perspective and sparks curiosity along the way. Have you ever wondered why clock emojis are organized under travel and places? 🤔

• We talk to Senior Park Ranger David Rogers about the thinking behind creating and building New Zealand’s national walking track network and reveal how information architecture can also live ‘in the wild’.

• UX developer Ben Chapman delves into the classification systems of libraries over time and ponders the pros and cons for users of moving information online.

• We talk to Sam Cope, Lead UX Designer at Wētā Workshop’s Interactive division about what it takes to drive design decisions with the end user in mind - something crucial for any video game’s success, whether it’s a blockbuster or something more niche.

• And much more about information architecture in unexpected places….

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The stories and people in this issue of CRUX certainly captured our imagination and attention - we hope they inspire and even surprise you too.

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Get comfortable and settle in for a great read. Welcome to CRUX #6.

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A plug for the next issue

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Do you have a burning idea to share or a conversation you’re dying to kickstart that’s of interest to the world of UX?  Now’s your chance.  We’re already on the lookout for contributors for our next edition of CRUX for 2022.  To find out more please drop us a line.