The 8 Types of Navigation Pages

Jared M. Spool and Christine Perfetti catalogued the patterns they saw when they watched users search for their desired content.

They concluded there are essentially 8 Types of Navigation Pages a user can run into, when searching content-rich sites:

 

8. Home Page (Landing pages)

 

These different page types turned out to be important as we discovered users behave differently as they encounter each one. If the design of a given type doesn’t support the user’s behavior, then the user is less likely to succeed in finding their target content. Often, pages fail because designers don’t realize they were designing for the wrong type.

 

Spool and Perfetti earlier presented seven types, but recent research revealed that Gallery-level search results behave differently than Department-level search result, and were therefore split into two types.

 

Other authors distinguish four types,