How to determine the order of navigation?

Design & UX
#1

Hi there,

I’m creating a website for my local town which will offer the following:

  • News (although this will be mainly just me and relying on others to submit news

  • business and services: a local business directory

  • events in the town

  • jobs: users/businesses to submit jobs

These will be the main areas of the website.

My question is how would I go about determining the order of these from testing? Basically I’d like to know the testing process behind the order of navigation.

Do I ask users or a group to find out what their requirements are for a website for their local town?

Any advice would be great!

Thanks

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#2

I would recommend a visit to the legendary Jakob Nielsen’s web site and explore their extensive research in the area.

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#3

Thanks for your question!

Erik_J’s link to Jakob Nielsen’s website is definitely a good resource to check out.

I would definitely do initial user interviews to understand what they need from such a website.

But make sure you define who those users are. Is this website mainly for newbies to your town? Are they for long-time residence? Both? If you have more than one user type, you should create personas for each of them.

You can look at what other local town websites are doing, such as what features or topics they include. This is called a competitive analysis.

You can even try testing something called card sorting with users to see what topics they value the most. This can help you decide which to prioritize.

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