The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is Fals

More important to good navigation are the following:

• Ensure that menu items have names with strong information scent and avoid vague, unfamiliar, or branded terms.
• Include clear wayfinding (e.g., breadcrumbs, local subnavigation) that shows users where they currently are in the IA.
• Avoid multilevel hierarchical dropdown menus (on desktop) in favor of mega menus.  Hierarchical (or cascading) dropdown menus are error-prone, require precise mouse movements, and show only one slice of the site IA at a time.  Mega menus usually display several levels of the information hierarchy and allow users to compare multiple pathways at a glance to understand which “neighborhood” they should be investigating. They also support easy error correction for users that make a mistake along the way. There is nothing more frustrating than a high interaction-cost process that you need to do twice because you clicked the wrong thing or accidentally closed the menu.
• Identify the most important information-seeking tasks, and surface links to them from the homepage and from other important pages.
• For pathways that do involve multiple steps, provide clear landing pages or navigation hubs at key points along the way. These landing pages offer groups of links, often with images or other elements that that help with unfamiliar terminology, provide stopping places along the way (that are retraceable with the Back button), and enable easy lateral movement to sibling pages in the same category. Remember, in most IAs, the higher levels of the hierarchy are general categories and the deeper ones are as more specific (and therefore, may require additional information or disambiguation along the way).
• Make sure that when a click results in a new page, the page load time is minimal. 3 clicks that each have a long load time lead to a worse experience than 5 clicks that quickly load.