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
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
Resources & references
- Tidwell, Brewer, Valencia (2020) Designing Interfaces, 3rd ed.
Appears in
Structuring the space
- Laying out the space, step 2 — Connect everything to everything
- Growing past the model, step 1 — Open direct paths between spokes
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 to
- Flat navigation — for content-focused applications
- Intent & Interaction — maximum efficiency for precise movement