Global Navigation

With five screens, where to put the menu was not a question. Once the count reached forty and different people had built different parts, menu positions and menu items started drifting apart.

That makes the user redo the same work on every screen. You're reading a document, you want team settings, and this particular screen has no menu — so you press back five times. Having to work out where you can go each time means the layout never becomes familiar, and the people who use the product most are the ones paying that cost most often.

Global navigation exists to make that a one-time cost. Fix the position and the items across the whole product and whatever the user learned once applies everywhere.

The same items appear in the same order in the same place on every screen — usually a band across the top or a vertical rail down the left — and that slot is never empty, whichever screen you open.

The items are the product's largest divisions, which means the first tier of the information architecture surfaces here directly. Information architecture is the skeleton deciding how content gets divided, named, and connected. Choosing what goes up here is therefore closer to deciding how to divide the product than to building a menu.

The count stops around five or six. Put twelve up and the user reads the list every time, while each label shrinks to a short word that no longer says much. Anything below that tier belongs to local navigation.

Marking which item you are currently inside is also this menu's job. Without the marker, people infer their location from the page content, and three levels in that inference goes wrong. Someone who believes they are in the wrong section reads everything on the screen against the wrong expectations.

"This doesn't belong in global — it should drop into the local menu inside documents."

The feature isn't one of the product's top-level divisions; it's something you do within one area.

"There are eight items in global navigation. Let's merge two and move one into settings."

The menu has turned into a list people have to read, so it needs cutting.

"We decided to hide the global menu on the checkout screen to reduce drop-off."

A deliberate exception, worth recording as a decision.

Pagedeck keeps three items: documents, teams, templates. Noa fields two or three requests a quarter to add a fourth, and usually turns them around with the same question — is this a fourth way of dividing the product, or something you do inside a document? If it's the latter, the feature goes into the document screen's local menu, and the global menu stays at three. Account and notification settings live separately in the utility navigation at the top right.