Web Design – Stop Making it Harder on Your Users

1) Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation

– they make it harder for users to navigate back to home. Use a left aligned logo. Here’s the study results: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/centered-logos/

– Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases.

What are the takeaways of this research for your next design project?

Desktop: There is plenty of screen real estate for displaying navigation options, and we recommend:

Do not use hidden navigation (such as hamburger icons) in desktop user interfaces.
Instead display the top-level navigation options, usually across the top of the page or down the left side.

Mobile: For phones, there is no hard-and-fast rule. But our general recommendations are:

If your site has 4 or fewer top-level navigation links, display them as visible links.
If your site has more than 4 top-level navigation links, the only reasonable solution is to hide some of these. We did find that the usability penalty imposed by hidden navigation is very present on mobile, but it is smaller than on the desktop. Thus, we recommend making this design tradeoff because the usability of an expandable navigation menu is far better than that of alternative designs.
Provide in-page links to important information on your site, or use other methods of supporting the hamburger (or some other hidden) menu.