In one of the healthcare systems we supported, we tracked over 800 pieces of clinical equipment across multiple sites. Defibrillators, IV pumps, ventilators, bladder scanners. When something went missing at 3 a.m., a nurse had to find it in less than a minute. Lives weren’t at stake in the abstract. They were at stake in that specific hallway. (That system — and a couple of dashboards we built around it — live on the work page if you want context.)
So we rebuilt the tracking system around a rule we still use in website navigation:
You don’t find things by remembering. You find them by scanning.
Nurses under pressure don’t think through a mental tree of categories. They look, they reject, they look, they move. Their brain is running on pattern matching, not logic. If a label didn’t immediately look like what they needed, they skipped past it — even when it was technically the right thing.
This is the part most website navigations get wrong. They’re organized the way the business thinks. “Solutions,” “Platform,” “Industries.” Internally, each label means something. To a visitor, they’re all grey. So they scan past, find nothing that clicks, and leave.
Good navigation isn’t a tree — it’s a set of outcomes
Compare:
- “Services” — forces the visitor to click and find out.
- “Build me a website” — already tells them what happens.
Or:
- “Resources” — a bucket of maybe.
- “How we work” — a promise of a known thing.
Scannable labels read like answers, not categories. They aren’t clever. They’re boring on purpose. Your visitors aren’t there to admire your taxonomy — they’re trying to solve a problem in the hallway, under time pressure, with other tabs open.
The 3 a.m. test
If your entire nav bar was covered in sticky notes and someone had five seconds to find the right one, would they? If the answer is “only if they already know your business,” you don’t have navigation. You have an org chart.
Fix it by writing every label like it’s the first and last word a visitor will read.