This is probably something that usability experts have down as some sort of Golden Rule, but an interesting question cropped up at work regarding the order of items in a main navigational list for a site. I tend to be fairly formulaic in the way that I build sites, gradually updating my approach as I have new ideas and learn new things. When it comes to navigation, there are tried and tested formulae that not only work well for navigating a site, but as also expected and can be predicted by the user.

My personal usability-experts-aside approach is that About goes as the first item on the list, and Contact goes as the last. This is based on a combination of the order working well on many projects for me in the past, along with the fact that this is where I’d personally expect to find those items on a site.

The counter-argument I was faced with earlier this week was that About isn’t the first thing you want to read – so why should it be first in the list? This forced me to think about navigation in a way I hadn’t thought about it before. My approach has always been one of trying to best work out where the user would expect to find each item – what I hadn’t considered is when they might expect to find it. Analyzing it further, I had to question whether my own convention of placing Contact last was for similar reasons. Making contact is usually the last thing you do on a site – you’ll read around for a while and if you’re going to make contact you do so and then leave the site.

Even so, I think I’m still happy in saying that items should be where the user expect to find them, regardless of the reasoning behind that expectation. What’s more, every user will have their own set of preferences and priorities and will browse a site in different ways – there’s a far greater chance of users being familiar with location conventions than order conventions. Do order conventions even exist?

So I’m throwing this one open. Give me your thoughts on the following:

1. Which navigational conventions are you familiar with?
2. What are your personal Golden Rules?
3. Which is more important to you – the order in which you expect to browse items, or the order in which you expect to find them?