interaction

Navigation

The on-screen components – menus, tabs, breadcrumbs, filters – that expose a product's information architecture to the user.

Navigation is the visible tip; the information architecture underneath is the iceberg (the image is navigation designer Nathaniel Davis’s, via Nielsen Norman Group). Menus, breadcrumbs, filters and footers are UI components – but what they contain was (or should have been) decided before they were styled.

The ordering rule matters: choose a navigation pattern before the structure is settled and the structure ends up bent around a hamburger menu nobody actually needed.