The provision of direct access from any location to every other, balancing navigational freedom against the cognitive cost of persistent global menus. Global navigation appears consistently across all pages — typically as a nav bar or/and a sidebar.
Behavioural position
Supports
- Navigating — maximum efficiency for precise movement
- Exploring — freedom to follow curiosity without constraint
- Browsing — can move laterally across sections whilst scanning
Challenges
The presence of full global navigation everywhere is not without cost: it takes up space, clutters the screen, and incurs cognitive load.
Variants
- Single-level: All navigation options at one level.
- Multi-level: Top navigation with secondary menus, or sidebars revealing subsections. Consider a hybrid with a tree
- Priority+: Shows most important items, hides rest behind “more” menu.
Related components
Complements
- Breadcrumbs — supplements with location context
- Navbar, sidebar, TODO: mega menus, tabs — implement this model
Resources & references
- Tidwell, Brewer, Valencia (2020) Designing Interfaces, 3rd ed.
Consequences
- every destination is one move from every other, and the shape of the whole is visible from anywhere — bought with screen space on every page, spent whether or not the actor on that page needs it
- the global menu is a fixed budget that content growth eats into; the set that has to fit the chrome stops fitting long before the content stops arriving, and what gives is either the depth on show or the topology
Related patterns
Complements
- Command menu — keyboard-driven alternative for power users
- Searching — alternative navigation path
- Deep linking — enables direct access to any page
- Hybrid patterns — can be combined with a multilevel tree as content grows
Alternatives
- Hub and spoke — for mobile or simpler structures
- Multilevel tree — for deep hierarchies
- Step by step — for focused processes
- Pan and zoom — pan/zoom hybrid for maps with discrete sections
Related
- Flat navigation — for content-focused applications
- Intent & Interaction — maximum efficiency for precise movement