UX Glossary · N
Navigation
The controls that let people move through a product and understand where they are.
Navigation is the visible layer of information architecture: menus, links, tabs, breadcrumbs, search. It answers three questions continuously: where am I, where can I go, and how do I get back.
Types
Global navigation appears everywhere and covers the main sections. Local navigation covers a section’s contents. Contextual links sit inside content and lead to related things. Utility navigation holds account, settings and help.
Search is navigation too, and for large content sets it is the primary one. Treating it as a fallback for people who failed to navigate misreads how most people use a big site.
What makes it work
Labels that match the user’s vocabulary rather than the organisation’s, which is where most navigation fails.
Clear current state, so “where am I” never needs guessing.
Predictable placement, because Jakob’s Law applies with force here.
Restraint in depth. Every extra level costs a decision, and decisions compound.
The mega menu question
Large dropdowns exposing many options at once are often criticised, but they can work well: they make a wide structure visible without repeated navigation, and Hick’s Law is manageable when the contents are grouped and labelled. They fail when they are ungrouped lists of forty links.
In practice
Watch for pogosticking, users entering a section and immediately reversing. It almost always indicates weak labels rather than a wrong structure.