I love the rush of creativity we see in website design. Having been fortunate enough to work with some excellent designers over the years, I appreciate a fresh, innovative visual design as much as the next person. But I often wish design teams would invest less energy in coming up with creative or "compelling" website navigation systems. You know the ones: menus that move around the screen playing hide and seek, or are scattered across the page, or refuse to reveal themselves until we discover them, or that just don’t look like anything we’ve seen before. Certainly navigation has a role to play in expressing a brand, but it has a more fundamental role -- to help people get where they’re going.  

That's why it's called navigation.

Navigating a website is like driving down the Interstate in an unfamiliar town. Website navigation systems are our road signs. When you’re cruising down I-94 trying to find the airport, the last thing you want is to stop and marvel at creative road signs. Predictable, consistent signage may not be exciting, but it makes getting around easier and safer.

The same goes for website navigation systems. Of course, the stakes are typically lower on websites than on highways, but putting too much emphasis on originality is dangerous online as well -- not to mention potentially expensive. Why? Because novel navigation means more risk of confusion, error and ultimately lost revenue. The fact is that people process information more easily and accurately when it conforms to their expectations.

I’m not saying website navigation shouldn’t be visually appealing. I’m just suggesting that it should be:

• placed in an expected location, across the top of each page and/or down the left side
• visible and legible without any action on the part of the user
• easily recognizable as a menu, and
• stable, so that it does not fly around the page as you try to use it

This doesn’t strike me as a big constraint on the creative process. After all, it's not as though there is some great upside to "creative" navigation. The truth is that most users just aren't that into your navigation -- they’re only interested in where it can take them. And getting them there smoothly is the ultimate positive reflection of your brand.