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Our designs tend to use the standard hamburger navigation for mobile sites (although I'm going to push to move into some alternatives in the future).

I'm aware that hidden navigation results in worse overall metrics, so the hidden navigation would only occur on mobile versions.

One strategy I've been considering is to duplicate key navigation elements on the home page, along with some additional context.

For example, if "Services" is one of the main navigation choices, which would be visible once you open the hamburger, I would have something like this:

crude mockup of redundant navigation link with description

In general, I try to avoid redundant links, because I think they can be frustrating when a user gets to the same place from two different links, plus too many links can cause user indecision.

Is this a valid strategy for offsetting the reduced utility of a hidden navigation approach for mobile?

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It all depends

If this is for a main page, then you can (and probably should) have this redundancy. Not because of discovery or hidden links issues or whatever, but because this is a homepage where some specific links (specially something like "Services") are the reason of the whole site/app to exist, so you give them more visibility.

Now, if your link was something like "Terms of Service" or "Sitemap", then you probably don't need the redundancy, although on a responsive site you can have these links on footer.

However, ask yourself: once you leave the main page.... are you going to replicate those big bulk boxes on each and every page? Of course not! You'll want your main content to be visible! And despite what NNG could say, people is already used to the hamburger or even the 3 dots menu icon. Sure, there might be a small group that would need to go through a discovery process, and sure, there are other ways. But these ways are really limited, and all of them, have issues as well

In short: unless you have 2 to 4 links only and you can afford for an alternative, you may duplicate links on homepage, but it doesn't make sense to duplicate them on inner pages. If needed, simply add an onboarding step, such as coach-marks or walk-through

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  • This would indeed be only for the home page.
    – Beofett
    Commented Jul 18, 2016 at 20:49

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