Help people know where they are, where they can go, and how to get back.
Navigation is the connective tissue of a product. Each layer does a different job — give them the right weight and the structure becomes invisible.
The persistent top-level nav present across the whole product. It exposes the main sections of the site or app and stays put as users move around — the stable map everything else hangs off of.
Contextual nav within a section, showing the siblings and children of the current area. It lets people browse around where they already are without zooming all the way back out to the top level.
Account, settings, search, help, cart — the supporting tools that sit apart from the content hierarchy, often in the top-right. They're available everywhere but aren't part of the main browsing path.
Show the user's location in the hierarchy and provide a path back up. Best for deep, hierarchical structures where people need to understand how far down they are and step back out one level at a time.
A catch-all for legal links, secondary links, and sitemap-style access. Lower priority than the primary nav, but useful for completeness and for SEO — it's where people look when the main nav doesn't have what they need.
Asking is starting to replace browsing. The nav doesn't disappear — it becomes a fallback and a map for what the assistant can do.
A prompt box is becoming a parallel way to navigate: instead of clicking through sections, users describe the destination and the assistant takes them there. Menus stay as the visible map of what's possible — and the safety net when the ask falls short.
AI can reorder, surface, or hide destinations based on what a user is likely to need next. Powerful for relevance — but keep the global chrome stable, or you erode the predictable map that makes navigation trustworthy.