Last January, freelance designer Kendra Gaines proposed three reasons for abandoning the navigation bar in website design. Yes, it sounds a little drastic and against everything we’ve always known. After all, we put the navigation bar in there to act as a guidepost for users so they can get to where they want to in our websites. When we take that away, we literally lose our audience.
Maybe this was true in the past. Nowadays, as everyone becomes wired to the Web and familiar with the online experience, we can expect users to know their way around. Google itself has introduced a minimalist design for its homepage last September. Instead of the black navigation bar, all of Google’s products are now tucked into a simple grid icon of 9 tiny squares.
We can afford to make minimalist designs like this because users are tech-savvier now. The three-line icon (or in Google’s case, 9-square grid) has become an almost universal symbol for the hidden menu. If you need anything, just click it and it’ll show you the navigation.
Rethinking Navigation Bars: Minimalist vs Fancy
While some are getting rid of the navigation bar, some are getting creative with it on the other hand, just like these websites with unusual navigation bars and menu. The goal is to make navigation bars simple yet striking, fancy, artful, ingenious, crazy and never boring.
And in way that’s good for the design world—it surprises and defies user expectations while inspiring designers all over. As Kendra Gaines said, flat design might be making our websites too simple, so it’s nice to see designers experiment with form and function in clever and more exciting ways than before.
To Keep the Navigation Bar or Not?
Frankly, there has got to be some sort of compromise between keeping the navigation bar and completely abandoning it. The search function seems to be trying to replace the nav bar of the past. Users simply type in anything they need and the choices automatically appear.
At the end of the day though, whether you decide to keep the navigation bar or not, the decision should be always about the user. After all, websites are created for them, so it makes sense to make it as accessible to everyone as possible.
We have 2 main reasons why we think navigation bars should stay:
User-friendliness is still the best policy
Good design should be user-friendly. Good designers test and retest their websites according to how a user would use it—whether a newbie or experienced one, elderly or young. In this sense, to keep everyone happy and comfortable, navigation bars are still needed.
Design elements should improve your business, not alienate potential customers
E-commerce websites cater to folks of different age groups with different online experiences – all the more reason to keep the navigation bar so that everything is within easy access. Businesses can’t afford to lose customers just because they lost their way around. For websites with a specific target audience who already have tech-savvy users, a nav-less web design might be okay.
Just because you need a navigation bar, it doesn’t mean it has to be boring!
Generally speaking, there’s no right or wrong when it comes to navigation bars. Having them never hurt anyone, but experimenting with different shapes, sizes and layouts is what keeps design interesting. If you are in e-commerce, you might want to stick to something more classic, but as long as you keep your users in the forefront of any design ideas, have fun getting creative!