I’ve always thought the 3-click rule was somewhat arbitrary. What if your website is full of in-depth content, and your audience is really into that? (Search engines love that…)
The Nielsen-Norman Group’s article, The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False (August, 2019), talks about the 3-click rule and suggests practical, evidence-based guidelines for getting from here to where your target audience is headed.
About the 3-click rule:
- The 3-click rule says that website users should be able to get anywhere on the site within 3 clicks.
- There’s no objective evidence for the 3-click rule.
- Task complexity needs to be considered.
- Some clicks result in more wait time than others (loading an entire page vs ticking a checkbox.)
- Using the 3-click rule for website navigation results in broad, shallow menus that take up lots of space on the screen and overhead for the user to comprehend.
- Confusingly, another broad hueristic, “no more than 7 main navigation items” leads to conflicting rules and muddled user interface (UI) choices that don’t always serve the task.
A quick summary of web navigation recommendations:
Give menu items strong names that represent the content contained within.
- Include wayfinding, such as breadcrumbs, menu changes, and date information.
- Use mega-menus at desktop size, which allow content comparison and easy error correction, instead of multi-level dropdowns.
- Provide additional paths to the most important content – links on the homepage or elsewhere in the UI.
- Use “navigation hubs” — a type of landing page which lists all of the navigation options in a section of a website — to help explain and facilitate completion of multi-step tasks. Such pages can help users understand complex information and find supporting or related content.
- Be sure your pages load quickly regardless of the number of clicks. Users will appreciate several quick clicks versus 3 slow clicks.
Read the full article at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/3-click-rule/
