A great navigation is intuitive, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-use and ideally, should not need some plug-in to be downloaded to use navigation. For example, a site navigation is designed using Flash and no alternative way of navigation is not provided, can you imagine how miserable an experience a user can have who doesn’t have flash installed on this machine?

So, we must design sites to good navigation to make the website or an application successful in terms of end-users’ experience while using our website / application.

Below given are some of the points which can help us design a better navigation that helps users to use your site:

1. Navigation Placement:
Make sure that the navigation is placed at an easily visible location, so that the users don’t have to “guess” or “search” for it.

2. Place important things on high:
Keep the important things on the top area of the page, preferably in the first half of the page. Such significant information should get displayed first to the user.

3. Banner Blindness:
As Wikipedia describes it – “Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information.

Make sure that you don’t put any content above the ad banners as users are tend to ignore all the content that’s displayed above ad banners. Make sure especially that navigation is not placed above such banners, as ‘navigation’ is very important & should not be ‘lost’.  [Read more about "Banner Blindness"]

4. Avoid being unconventional:
Designing website navigation in an ‘unconventional’ way to make the site stand out from the crowd is NOT a good method of navigation design. It becomes difficult for the users who are now quite used to the general web design practices of designs, navigation & such other generic functionality.

5. Ideally, an easy way to come back to homepage, like a HOME link should be always there:
Homepage being core of any website, a back-link to the homepage should always be there. Also, it is very much possible that user might have landed up on your website through some search engine or have come directly to your sub-page / inner page, a “home” link always helps them to come back to the homepage of your website.

6. Keep the navigational elements consistent across the website:
Make sure that all the links & navigational elements are kept consistently on the same place as there have been anywhere else, in terms of links, styles, etc. User can find them easily anywhere in the site.

7. Design it to ‘load fast’:
Do all your design & development by considering a user having low-speed internet connections. Make sure that your all your site’s HTML, CSS, Flash components (if any) loads faster,  so that users do not leave the site quickly even before it loads as they may not be ready to wait or may switch to your competitor’s site.

8. Quality as against to Quantity:
Internet users like minimum options & clicks to get the desired information. Create sub-sections & sub-categories to help the user to “navigate easily & locate the required content easily & quickly”.

9. Browser-Compatibility:
There is multi-browser application scenario.  Do compatibility tests for your website before it goes live on major browsers like “MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, and Opera” & check if the look & feel as well functionality of JavaScript used in the site is working well.

10. ONLY essential stuff in the navigation:
Non-core Information like “Privacy Policy, Terms of use, even Contact Us (in most cases)” should not be in the main navigation & can be placed in the “bottom menus” zone.

Also read:

Navigation Design for Mobile Web – Best Practices

Drop Down Menus – Usability

Do provide your suggestions / insights that can imprve the way we design navigation.

These new kind of drop down menus has features like:

• Everything visible at the same time, so users don’t have to scroll (in most cases).
• Split into two or more panels for an easy to understand navigation interface and grouped sensibly.
• Has features like usage of typography, icons (even may be thumbnails), assistive features like tool tips.
• Users don’t have to remember a lot, everything being visible upfront (as the short-term memory is involved while browsing such objects and several users may miss it as they rely on short term memory).

These kinds of menus are easy-to-use and have been rated good on usability as per tests done by the Jakob Nielsen’s (Alertbox, March 23, 2009).

Also, in desktop application interfaces (GUIs) like Microsoft© Office 2007 , this kind of drop down menus with illustrations has been used effectively.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 – Formatting

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 – Publish Slides

Below given are some of the examples:

Microsoft US homepage

BP homepage

CompareIndia.com homepage

You can read more about the Mega Drop Down menus on Jakob Nielsen’s website: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html