Crafting an Intuitive Application Navigation System

Strategies for Designing Effective Application Navigation

For the past few days, I am working on designing the navigation for a new application. Defining the correct navigation structure is the most important aspect of your application’s user experience. A clear and intuitive navigation structure ensures that the users can quickly locate the features they require and increases the engagement with your application.

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Here are some of the considerations while defining the structure of your navigation.

Information Architecture

First task is to identify what is the primary purpose of the application. It also helps to identify what is the primary usage of the application. The user may be coming to the application either to get information or to perform certain tasks. More often than not it might mixture of both. It is important to identify entire feature set of your application, organize it, and label it. This aspect is covered by the field of Information Architecture.

When designing an application, it is important to categorize all the features and functions to meet the users’ perspective. Throwing all the different things that users can perform under loosely categorized menu isn’t going to be intuitive…