Goal
Ensure users know where they are in the navigation.
Why this matters
A sense of place is necessary to users to understand their environment, direction, and tasks. In other words, if you don’t know where you are in the system you can’t understand if you’re in the right place to meet your goal.
How to implement
UX Designers
Ensure that menus and other navigation elements that will use the <nav> tag have a visual design that differentiates the selected navigation element (“where I am now”) from the non-selected elements (“where I could go”).
Developers
Implement the design provided by your UX Designer.
How to test
Ensure that for each navigational element on the page…
- The visual design differentiates between the current option and other options.
- Only one item in that specific navigational element is selected (or “current”).
- “Nothing is selected” is a failure state.
- “Two things can be selected in this menu at once” is a failure state.