Your website's navigation bar could be costing you customers

At least, that is the finding of a recent study by Tank Design, a branding, design and marketing agency. How important are the navigation buttons at the top of your page? According to the research, they are essential, as long as they make sure your customers find exactly what they are looking for. After all, it is not called "navigation" for nothing.

Yet many companies, even large ones and especially in business to business, keep using the same kind of navigation tabs on their websites, to the point where they no longer stand out from the competition, or in Google's rankings. According to the research, people usually do not know what lies behind those generic links to "Products", "Services" or "Resources", because the terms are too vague.

The agency's user experience specialist, one of the people behind the surveys, even says there is an undeniable pattern in the use of these words. "We have a really hard time convincing our clients to change, because everyone does it that way," he says.

The agency's experts believed it was possible to offer users a better experience. According to ISO, user experience is "a person's perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service", and it is a "consequence of brand image, presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour and assistive capabilities of the interactive system".

So the team decided to investigate on its own after failing to find hard evidence for what they had always believed. In the surveys, people said what they thought of navigation bars, what 'navigating' actually meant to them and what they thought of the buttons. "Although there was research explaining the danger of vague labels, we couldn't find conclusive proof to convince clients that these marketing terms were not neutral for users, but had a somewhat negative impact on their website experience, on engagement and even on turning visits into purchases," says one of the researchers.

"Our premise was that those terms mean something to the people inside the companies, but we proved they mean nothing to website visitors," he continues. The experts built a hyper-realistic scenario in which a small business owner is looking for a conference call solution that works in several countries. They then asked 217 study participants to imagine visiting the websites of companies in this field, where they found a navigation bar with five options: Tools, Platform, Products, Services and Solutions.

Next, they asked respondents where they thought specific content would be. "We asked, for example, where they would find information on international call rates, integrations, mobile capabilities and so on." The results led to one basic conclusion: there was no consensus, across demographics including gender, location, income, age and education. "We found that no matter how many ways we sliced the results, we could not get the same answer more than 75% of the time (the minimum acceptable figure for consensus)."

Of the five questions, only one got more than 50% of the answers, with more than half of the respondents choosing the same tab. In other words, it was digital chaos. Broadly, the results were as follows: for every 10 people who visited the website, three looked for the content under Solutions, two under Platform, two under Products, two under Services and one under Tools. "And that is a failure," admits one of the researchers.

A failure indeed. According to separate research by the Nielsen Norman Group, specialists in usability, a typical page is visited for one minute. To make visitors stay longer, companies need to get their value proposition across in about ten seconds.

So, what is the answer to this problem?

Tabs should be as specific and clear as possible. A website that shows this well is Zooplus, which sells pet food and pet products. On the site, you can easily search by type of animal and by the kind of product you are looking for. Specific links have a double advantage: as well as giving visitors a better experience when using the website, they also help improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By saying exactly what you offer, you encourage Google and other search engines to crawl your website.

Putting yourself in your customer's shoes is also key to getting good results, and it matters a great deal online. That is why companies should choose tab titles that make sense from the user's point of view, even if they are not the exact terms used internally. After all, customers do not care about the brand's internal structure; they see the company as a single entity.

Let your customers tell you how to organise everything you have to offer, because they usually see things from the outside and in a different light. Companies that don't do this and keep insisting on being exactly like everyone else will certainly pay the price.