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A website with long page scrolling with deep hierarchical content wants to follow best practices when adapted to mobile. The designer currently recommends that the navigation change to a local navigation as user begins to scroll down. Is this considered best practice?
Global nav is pictured all the way to the right, while proposed local navigation is the two left most photos. Thank you
In one of your comments, you said the hierarchy is 3 levels deep, but on the demo site I saw only has 2.
I would just leave it as you have it now. The navigation itself is not very long, so there is not so much content to scroll trough. Making it really easy to understand for users. The navigation is crystal clear this way.
The double navigation might be a good idea for 3 level deep hierarchy, but personally I wouldn't place it into one navigation bar. I consider myself to be tach savvy person, and since I am a designer, I think I understand a lot of different navigational patterns. But I would find this very confusing. I would propose adding additional bar with links to different sections of the document, like in the image below.
Good question, mobile navigation can be quite tricky. I would not use a local menu if the same content can be reached by using the global menu. Users will have no sense of where they are in your hierarchy. I also don't think users wil understand the arrow representing a global menu.
I would be helpful if you could post the hierarchy (or the amount of items it contains) so we can give you better advice.
What you can do is put the first two levels of menu items in your global navigation. Then you can create a menu/index with the third level of menu items on a page itself (like shortcuts, or hidden behind a button). How deep is your hierarchy?
How about adding a sort of "Table of contents" at the top of the page, listing the different headers and even linking to them, with the option of a "back to top" icon by each header further down on the page. (Niether of these should be sticky.)
That way it is simple to get an overview of the content and also to navigate up/down without having to scroll too much.
But I would also suggest to check out wikipedia's mobile solution, I did a quick check and they did not appear to compensate for large amounts of scrolling (other than an option to search within the page from the main menu).
