Making ubuntu.com responsive: adapting our navigation to small screens (9)

This post is part of the series ‘Making ubuntu.com responsive‘.

One of the biggest challenges when making the move to responsive was tackling the navigation in ubuntu.com. This included rethinking not only the main navigation with first, second and third level links, but also a big 3-tier footer and global navigation.

1. Brainstorming

Instead of assigning this task to a single UX designer, and with the availability of everyone in the team very tight, we gathered two designers and two UX designers in a room for a few hours for an intensive brainstorming session. The goal of the meeting was to find an initial solution for how our navigation could work in small screens.

We started by analysing examples of small screen navigation from other sites and discussing how they could work (or not) for ubuntu.com. This was a good way of generating ideas to solve the navigation for our specific case.

We decided to keep to existing common design patterns for small screen navigation rather than trying to think of original solutions, so we stuck with the typical menu icon on the top right with a dropdown on click for the top level links.

Settling on a solution for second and third level navigation was trickier, as we wanted to keep a balance between exposing our content and making the site easy to navigate without the menus getting in the way.

We thought keeping to simple patterns would make it easier for users to understand the mechanics of the navigation quickly, and assumed that in smaller screens users tend to forgive extra clicks if that means simpler and uncluttered navigation.

2. Prototyping

With little time on our hands, we decided we’d deliver our solution in paper sketches for a prototype to be created by our developers. The starting point for the styling of the navigation should follow closely that of Ubuntu Insights, and the remaining tweaks should be built and designed directly in code.

We briefed Ant with the sketches and some design and UX direction and he quickly built a prototype of the main navigation and footer for us to test and further improve.

3. Improving

We gathered again to test and review the prototype once it was ready, and suggest improvements.

Everyone agreed that the mechanics of the navigation were right, and that visual tweaks could make it easier to understand, providing the user with more cues about the hierarchy of the content.

Initially, when scaling down the screen the search and navigation overlapped a small amount before the small screen menu icon kicked in, so we also thought it would be nice to animate the change of the amount of padding between widths.

We also made sure that if JavaScript is not available, when the user clicks on the menu icon the page scrolls down to the footer, where the navigation is accessible.

Some final thoughts

When time is of essence, but you still want to be able to experiment and generate as many ideas as possible, spending a couple of hours in a room with other team members, talking through case studies and how they can be applied to your situation proved a really useful and quick way to advance the project. And time and time again, it has proved very useful to invite people who are not directly involved with the project to give the team valuable new ideas and insights.

We’re now planning to test the navigation in our next quarterly set of usability testing, which will surely provide us with useful feedback to make the website easier to navigate across all screen sizes.

Read the next post in this series: “Making ubuntu.com responsive: dealing with responsive images”

Reading list

• New Layouts for the Multi-Device Web
• New Rule: Every Desktop Design Has To Go Finger-Friendly
• Responsive Navigation: Optimizing for Touch Across Devices
• Responsive Navigation Patterns
• Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid
• Global navigation is less useful on large, complex websites
• Implementing Off-Canvas Navigation For A Responsive Website