Your website navigation should be your users’ guide – helping them find what they need quickly and confidently. But for many organisations, it soon becomes a barrier rather than a bridge. 

I’ll wager you have a hunch that your website navigation is sub-optimal. If you’ve ever watched someone struggle to find something on your website or your analytics displays high bounce rates and confused user journeys, your navigation is likely part of the problem. 

The two main reasons navigation fails 

1/. Your navigation reflects how you structure your business

Most website navigation is built around internal org charts, product categories, or service lines that make perfect sense to your team. But your customers don’t think in terms of your departmental structure. They think in terms of their problems, needs, and goals. 

When navigation mirrors internal logic rather than user logic, people can’t find what they’re looking for – even when it’s there, hidden in plain sight.

2/. Things get added over time without proper consultation

Navigation ‘miraculaously’ expands, and it is this evolution over time that creates many user experience problems. A new service gets added here, a campaign landing page gets squeezed in there, someone insists their department needs top-level visibility. Before you know it, your navigation is a patchwork of compromises rather than a coherent system. 

The result? User confusion and people leaving your site to find what they need elsewhere. 

What makes navigation actually work? 

Effective navigation isn’t just about menus and dropdowns. It’s a system built on five interconnected elements:

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the structure behind your content – the logic that determines what goes where and why. A good taxonomy is intuitive: users can predict where to find things based on natural mental models. A poor taxonomy is a tangled mess where even your own team struggles to know where content lives. 

Ask yourself: If a first-time visitor needs to find something on your site, would the structure make sense to them? Or would they need insider knowledge? 

Categorisation

How you group your products, services, and content matters enormously. Are things categorised by how customers think about them, or by how you’ve historically organised your business? 

For example, a university might organise a career support website by faculty (School of Business, School of Engineering). But students often think by outcome (“I want to work in sustainability” or “I’m interested in technology and creativity”). The mismatch creates friction. 

Good categorisation meets users where they are, not where you wish they were. 

Labels and terminology

Your navigation labels need to be immediately clear to first-time visitors. That means: 

• Avoiding internal jargon 
• Using language your customers actually use 
• Being specific enough to be helpful, but not so specific you need a glossary 

“Solutions” means nothing. “Customer Insights” is vague. “What We Do” wastes valuable cognitive energy. Clear, plain language always wins. 

Dual positioning

Sometimes users legitimately expect to find the same thing in multiple places. For instance, “Events” might reasonably live under ‘About Us’ AND ‘Services’. 

Good navigation recognises these expectations and accommodates them, rather than forcing users to hunt for a single, arbitrary location or havimg to choose one of two possible routes.  

Design and interaction

Navigation isn’t just about information architecture – it’s also about how it looks, feels, and behaves. Is it visually clear? Is it accessible to people using assistive technology? Does it work well on mobile? Can users see where they are and how to get back? 

Poor design can undermine even the best taxonomy. Great design makes good structure invisible – users simply find what they need without thinking about it. 

The solution: An outside-in perspective

The common thread in all five elements? They require looking at your navigation from the outside in, not the inside out. 

That’s where external UX expertise makes all the difference. We work with your team and, crucially, with your actual customers through research activities like card sorting, tree testing, and usability testing. This reveals how people naturally think about and categorize your content – not how you think they should. 

The result is a navigation built on evidence, not assumptions. Navigation that helps rather than hinders. 

What’s possible for your site? 

Every organisation’s navigation challenges are unique. The categories that confuse your users, the labels that create friction, the structural decisions that seemed logical five years ago but no longer serve you – these are specific to your context, your audience, your business. 

If you’re curious about what user-centred navigation could mean for your site, we’d welcome a conversation. We offer a free navigation UX review where we bring an objective view of how real users experience your site, and explore what’s working and what could work better.  

About Experience UX 

We’re a UK-based UX research and design consultancy specialising in helping organisations create websites that actually work for their users. Our taxonomy redesign projects combine expert analysis with real user research to build navigation systems that are intuitive, effective, and aligned with how your customers think. 

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