Building navigation for your doc site: 5 best practices
summary
Usability testing shows users routinely fail to locate answers so five concrete practices guide fixes: use the doc homepage as a routing portal, add a navigation sidebar with a scoped hierarchical TOC, surface high‑traffic pages from metrics and add abundant inline links and workflow maps to keep people oriented, and consolidate tiny fragments into longer modular pages with on‑page TOCs and breadcrumbs so sequences and next‑steps are visible and findable.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:45List of parts
- 5:32Whole
- 6:06Sidebar
- 6:44hierarchies
- 7:31progressive disclosure
- 8:38Azure Docs example
- 9:07AWS example
- 10:00Immersion
- 11:39Bottomup navigation
- 13:17Findability
- 13:51Desire Line
- 15:11Reduce information fragmentation
- 17:12On page TOC functions
- 18:52Workflow Maps
- 20:14Discussion Question
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