Linear Navigation Pattern

Audience / Scenario

The people who visit/use the site:

• want a simple way to navigate from one page to the next in a linear fashion, i.e. traverse through a sequence of pages

The people who own the site:

• want to provide simplified navigation within a hierarchical structure

When and where?

You should use this pattern when:

• there is a clearly defined sequence of pages (eg. several "sibling" pages with the same "parent" page)

You should avoid this pattern if:

• the current page is a key entry point to your site (eg. the home page) from where the visitor must choose from a selection of distinct options to branch in to a relevant area of the site

You should incoporate this pattern in any of the following locations:

• any area of the site that has related content which can be arranged in to a linear fashion

Solution

Provide "next" and "previous" navigation links to allow the visitor to move back and fourth through a series of pages.

Why?

Linear navigation is really easy to understand because you only have two choices: go foreward to the next page or back to the previous page.

Within a hierarchically structured site, linear navigation can be useful in any location that has several pages attached to the same parent page, primarily because those pages are intrinsicly related to each other. By providing linear navigation in this scenario, it allows the visitor to browse the pages without needing to keep returning to the parent page. This reduces load on the server and reduces the amount of page refreshes endured by the visitor.

Examples

In many cases you can automate linear navigation - for example, we use the scrollbar macro throughout our user guides as seen below:

Anti-patterns

The order of the pages must remain the same, at least within the current browsing session. If visitors start to use linear navigation and find that the order of pages changes every time they use it, they'll quickly grow to hate it.

Related Pages