The Field Kit

Codex: Navigation

What each way of moving says before it's touched

| Element | Says | Breaks when | |---|---|---| | Nav item (sidebar, top bar, menu) | you'll go somewhere else: a different context | it only filters, toggles a panel or expands something, and you stay exactly where you were | | Tab | you'll stay, and see another face of the same thing; the tabs are peers | it looks like a nav item, or wanders off to a different record while its siblings stay home. (A tab can have its own address and still be a face of one record.) | | Breadcrumb | where you are in a hierarchy, and the way up | there's no hierarchy to show, or it's used as the main way between sections (a ladder pressed into service as a hallway) | | Back | the step you just took, reversed | it jumps to a fixed parent instead of where you actually came from | | Button | something will happen | it sits in the navigation and looks like moving |

Under all of them: navigation moves you; actions do something. Navigation you can walk back. Actions, often, you can't.

Scope matches the shell

| Scope | True… | Lives in | |---|---|---| | Global | everywhere | the top bar | | Local | inside this section | the sidebar, which changes per section | | Contextual | for this record | the page itself |

Local navigation in the global shell tells the person section-specific things are universal. Record-level actions in the sidebar tell them a one-record operation applies to the whole section.

The mobile collapse. Fold the sidebar into the top bar. Whatever stays reachable was global; whatever folds was local. A "global" item that vanishes on a phone was never global, and the people on phones pay for the mislabel.

(The URL Is the Honest One)