Navigation priority

It’s a common practice to prioritize navigation into a primary navigation with essential functions and divert other information to less prominent navigation. View Sears for example; the “Shop Departments” menu is clearly the primary navigation, while links to Customer Service and Store Locations are text links at the top. With a retail website, the choice for what goes where is obvious: the primary navigation is for directing the user to potential purchases, everything else is secondary. Very few retail websites get this wrong.

Non-retail companies have a more difficult time determining what merits prominence, or even if information should be segregated. The former depends on the site’s target demographic, and the latter on how much information there is to present.

Well-designed primary navigation not only directs users efficiently to the information they want, but doubles as a sales pitch about the company. For retail sites, it tells the user what kinds of products they’ll find for sale. The primary navigation at CNN immediately tells you what kind of news you’ll find there, and gives you an idea of how important each type of news is to them by order of priority. The primary navigation may not even be a series of choices; Grooveshark presents a simple search bar that encapsulates the purpose of the site.

The difficult part is never deciding what should be primary navigation, it’s cutting out what shouldn’t, which comes down to determining the primary demographic and what their needs are. Of course, that’s easier said than done, and most clients want every possible visitor to be a “primary demographic”, but that’s another discussion entirely. Once a target demographic is known and their needs are identified, there’s still the potential to segregate navigation to primary navigation that informs and markets to the user, and secondary information.

zu has been working with Cameco on the redesign of their website. Many different target demographics were identified (employees, job seekers, regulators, the media, people looking for information about the nuclear industry, and many others), but the primary demographic was narrowed down to investors. The primary navigation specifically targets this demographic with information relevant to them and providing an overview of the company from an investment standpoint. The navigation highlights information specific to investing, shows the range of Cameco’s operations for those only familiar with their mining operations, and makes it clear that marketing the industry and good corporate practices are also top priorities for the company. So what was left out, and how were other demographics accommodated? Generic information about the company was moved to secondary navigation; the whole site is largely information about the company, so the “About” section serves as a quick overview for random information seekers. Job-seekers were considered an important demographic, but was kept as secondary navigation because having careers in the primary navigation didn’t help with the messaging to investors, and because people coming to the site looking for jobs don’t need to be sold to, they will seek out and find what they need.

The media is generally directed to a specific page, or, like job seekers, are looking for their specific information, and don’t need to be marketed to. The needs of regulators and employees overlapped with those of investors, so information targeting them is within the primary navigation. While the structure and terminology was chosen to target investors, these other demographics were also considered for clarity. For example, there were many possibilities for “Investors”, but other investment-related terms were rejected for potential ambiguity on whether it was about investing in Cameco, or investments Cameco has made; “Financial Information” is awkward and incomplete; and other terms were potentially confusing to secondary demographics.

It’s always a struggle to keep information out of the primary navigation (particularly convincing a client, who then has to pacify demoted corporate divisions). The utility of a website is greatly improved when not only is the primary demographic known, but spoken to directly through navigation that both informs and serves as the company pitch.

twitpitch: Best practices for well-designed primary navigation. Some good user experience examples from @zutweets Levi Myers http://bit.ly/2KR7U1