Hello, this is Mikel with Tiny Frog Technologies and we’re filming again from Native Foods which is one of my favorite vegetarian restaurants in San Diego and I want to talk a little bit about creating a user-friendly web navigation and I want to correlate that to the menu at a particular restaurant.
This particular restaurant has a very clean, easy to follow menu. It’s just two pages. Even though they have quite a bit of things on their menu, it’s very user friendly. So when you go to a website, you probably have had this experience – when you go to the navigation bar which is one of the very first places that people go to when they land on a website – you may notice that the navigation is overwhelming. That’s a big no-no in terms of creating an effective user experience on a website.
How to Create a User-Friendly Web Navigation
Most websites – an effective website – if possible, has a very easy to follow, very intuitive, very clean navigation without a lot of dropdown options, without a lot of fly outs which is almost like a drop down off a drop down.
So that would be related to if you go to a restaurant, let’s say they have a 15-page menu, I’m sure most of you have had this experience and just instantly feeling overwhelmed like where do I start, what do I look for? If these things aren’t categorized well, that can be a challenge as well. So very similar to a navigation experience on a website, if the navigation is very clean with very few dropdown options and very few disorganizing factors, it can make the website experience much cleaner.
When you go to a restaurant, you’re there and you’re going to use the menu, but if someone comes to your website, there’s no guarantee that they’re gonna stick around on your website. And if you ever look at your analytics and you notice people are leaving your website very quickly, one of the factors may be that your navigation is overwhelming. So it’s probably in your best interest to look through your navigation to try to clean it up as much as possible.
Often times that will mean getting rid of a lot of unnecessary content, moving it over to a blog, amalgamating pages. And as a rule of thumb, you should have as few dropdown options as possible. Now if you have a very big website that has tons of content, it may be more difficult and there’s other ways to make the website navigation more intuitive as well.
If you have any questions on how to create a good user experience or a user-friendly web navigation, definitely let us know.
