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I have a fairly simple site map with two levels of pages in several categories:

Landing A
- A1
- A2
- A3

Landing B
- B1
- B2
- B3

etc.

Would having a mobile navigation consisting mainly of accordions (which reveal links to navigate to the actual pages) be overwhelming or require too many steps? It'd be two taps for almost all sections to get to the content.

Is it an issue to treat the "Landing A" as an accordion filter, and then create an "Overview" page to show the original "Landing A" content? So, on mobile it would become:

Filter A
-Overview A (What used to be a landing page)
-A1
-A2
-A3

I felt that keeping a long menu with all sections open would be require too much scrolling.

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  • 4
    Usability is not determined by the number of clicks or amount of scrolling, but rather how the user understands your UI. The generic terms in question and lack of user context make a meaningful answer hard to achieve. The filter page sounds confusing - so concept likely to confuse / be valueless to users.
    – Jason A.
    May 7, 2014 at 17:06
  • I think the term you're looking for here is discoverability.
    – Majo0od
    Apr 3, 2015 at 13:16
  • 2
    Define 'too much scrolling'. On mobile, scrolling is arguably the easiest interaction to use.
    – DA01
    Aug 31, 2015 at 13:29

3 Answers 3

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I personally find that "landing pages" are very rarely helpful in any way. If your information architecture is good, it should be unnecessary in which case I'd say just let your users use an accordion filter with Landing A as a button to open the Accordion and nothing more, if they're on a mobile device it's unlikely that they need an introduction to Section A, or Section B. They probably know what they want and are looking to go straight to it.

If you find that there's too much scrolling happening, you might need to rework your information architecture and split up your level two categories (A1, A2, B1, B2) into more categories so that the accordions that users open up are shorter. Try to keep them to 3-4 links each and it shouldn't be a problem.

The best way to figure this out though is to do rapid prototypes and test them! A/B tests would work well for this, without seeing your actual IA it's hard to tell just based on this.

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Almost every ecommerce based website or app has a navigation similar to this, the key is to keep the top level number of categories to a limited scope. If there are say more than a dozen then you may want to collect them into fewer categories. Most users are not opposed to srolling so if the list when expanded is not more than say 3 screen swipes it shouldn't pose a problem. More than that overwhelms the users.

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My best solution is to use two full page divs position:absolute to the center of the page. I list down the main categories in the first and when clicked the other div slides in with the further navigations, which can be dynamically changed with jQuery. Use CSS3 transform for all these, and let JS handle the content change, that's it. Accordions make the site feel bloated, and most of them do not perform well. On mobile, it's really messy.

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