Navigation Influencers - IV

 Labels: labels, which should be preferably centered underneath icons, should always accompany icons even when the icons are recognizable, and especially when they are not. The exception to this rule is when secondary functions represented by icons without labels need to be de-emphasized compared to primary functions represented by icons with labels that need to be emphasized. Thus, the importance of a function represented by an icon is usually determined by the size, the location, and the label (or lack thereof) of the icon. A bad scenario is to use unrecognizable icons without a label for a primary function, and the worst scenario is the absence of any icons or any labels, which leads to a total confusion as shown in the example below. In this case, the navigation of this website consists of bunch of meaningless bubbles that leave visitors totally confused. Specifically:
o A visitor has to guess that those bubbles are actually sections in the website.
o A visitor has to hover over a bubble to discover its corresponding section. In the example below, the user hovered over a bubble and got the “Contact Us” section.
o A visitor cannot tell which bubble belongs to “Contact Us” – it’s mumbo-jumbo. The tooltip position does not properly identify the bubble that it corresponds to.
o A visitor cannot quite catch a bubble because they are so bouncy.
This is a perfect example of the worst possible navigation system. In search of being different, unique, creative, and clever, the designer, who might have thought that the web was created as a showroom to exhibit hi/her artistic talent, ended up being not just annoying but even frustrating to visitors of that website.