UI Design

If the user can't find it, it's not there!

It is frequently said that navigation is 80% of good usability. I've often wondered what that means. What are the parameters that make a site navigable? What specifically do I need to get right to automatically have it be 80% good?

User-centered Web designers answer this question reflexively. Good navigation means good information architecture. Good information architecture means having a hierarchical structure and the right labels. Having the right structure means deriving the hierarchy that reflects users' mental organization of the information. Using the right labels means ignoring the organization's (branded) terms for things and adopting the users' vocabulary for tokens and categories.
These two parameters – structure and labels – are asserted to be as independent and complimentary. Neither is individually sufficient to trigger that 80% usability threshold. You have to get both right.