Is a table a good idea for navigation?

Question

We're discussing in my office about having a table where every row is clickable and used for navigation. Is that a good idea?

The context is: "Users" are involved in "projects", a "project" contains multiple "campaigns", a "campaign" contains multiple "points".

What do you think about the tab "campaign" containing a table with the information about the different campaigns, and each row being clickable to jump directly to the table of points. In that case, some style could be added, like putting the name of the campaign as a link, to make clear that it's clickable.

We're specifically discussing whether it is intuitive or not to click on a row of a table to navigate. I attach an image of how the table and the whole interface looks like.

The other proposal is: "if you want to go see the points associated with a particular campaign, you click on the tab points (the one below "Campañas", which is Spanish for campaigns)"

Answer 1

There could be use cases as well as good arguments for any structure, I feel the need for semantic markup would override any validity in implementation of a table for a menu (Which is different than a Table of Contents).

I would put forward:

• The difference between a ul and a table element is minimal when utilizing CSS. Both are container elements with children, I don't think there is much you could do with one that you couldn't do with the other (most differences are only applied UI by your browser).
• There are technologies which do expect certain DOM elements to use certain tag names.
• Uniformity across the web.
• Things like active trail classes, keyboard navigation, role attributes, etc. probably are already implemented by your CMS or another system, would there be a significant amount of work needed to apply this to a table? These are valuable attributes.
• Tables themselves are used for displaying aggregation. Tables typically show related data, site menus follow a different data relationship.

Is it a good idea? I don't think, and most users won't mind, what your menu is made of. However, menus are always described as "lists of links".

Try using one of the assistive technologies to navigate your site with the above menu, that will tell you a lot. I would also lean heavily on divining some SEO data.

https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/navigation

If this isn't your main site menu, then I personally wouldn't be too concerned, it could be viewed as a tool for users.

If this is your main menu, I would stick to semantic markup. Can you get your desired layout by styling a ul?

Answer 2

This is counter to user expectation. Users have been trained (by the websites they've used) to have specific items lead to specific places.

Now, that being said. Users will learn how this work quickly. They'll get feed back by the mouseover and cursor change as well as when they do click on one of the buttons they'll see that the landing page covers all choices.

If this is truly a value-added proposition then by all means do so. But if this is simply "hey, let's do it this way" then I would strongly recommend against it.