Nobody has ever left a website because the menu was too clear. But 67 percent of mobile users will leave if the navigation frustrates them.
Your navigation is not a branding exercise
Somewhere in the design process, someone decided your menu should be different. "About" became "Our Story." "Services" became "The Lab." "Work" became "Discover." "Contact" became "Say Hello." The navigation stopped describing what was on the website and started trying to describe what the brand felt like.
The intention is always the same. Stand out. Look more creative than the competition. Give the website personality. And the result is always the same too. Visitors arrive, glance at the menu, and have no idea where anything is.
The Nielsen Norman Group put it directly in their menu design guidelines: "Menus are not the place to get cute with made-up words, internal jargon, or abstract high-level categorization." Users are not impressed by novel labels. They are slowed down by them.
Your visitors are not evaluating your creativity when they look at the menu. They are trying to find something. If they cannot find it in seconds, they leave.
Your visitors already know where things should be
Jakob Nielsen, the most cited usability researcher in history, formalised this in 2000. He called it Jakob's Law: users spend most of their time on other websites. They prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
By the time someone lands on your website, they have visited thousands of others. They have built a mental model of how websites work. About pages are called About. Services pages are called Services. Contact pages are called Contact. This is not a lack of imagination. It is a pattern that works because everyone uses it.
When you replace "Services" with "The Lab," you are not differentiating. You are breaking a pattern the visitor relies on. They have to stop and think. What is The Lab? Is it a blog? A portfolio? A resource section? That hesitation is small, but it adds up. Because the visitor did not come to your website to decode your navigation. They came to find something specific.
Google's own UX research confirmed this. In a study on visual complexity and prototypicality, they found that users strongly prefer websites with high prototypicality. The more a website looks and works like what users expect, the more positively they judge it. That preference forms within 17 milliseconds. Creative navigation labels work against prototypicality. They make the site feel unfamiliar. And unfamiliar means untrustworthy.
Nobody reads your menu. They scan it.
A Nielsen Norman Group study found that 79 percent of users scan web pages rather than reading them word by word. They are looking for recognisable patterns, not parsing unfamiliar language. Your navigation is scanned the same way.
Eye tracking research from Missouri University of Science and Technology found that users spend an average of 6.44 seconds looking at the navigation menu during a visit. That is total time, not per label. With five or six menu items to process, each label gets roughly one second of attention.
"About" communicates its meaning in that second. "Our Story" takes longer because the visitor has to translate it. "The Experience" takes longer again because it could mean almost anything. NNG's own research explicitly calls out "Explore," "Discover," and "Learn" as vague verbs that fail in navigation because they offer too little differentiation.
This is Hick's Law in practice. Decision time increases not just with the number of choices, but with the ambiguity of each choice. Three clear labels are faster to process than three clever ones. Standard labels reduce cognitive load because the brain does not need to interpret them. It recognises them.
On mobile it is worse
On a phone, your navigation is already hidden behind a hamburger icon. A NNG study of 179 participants found that hidden navigation increased task completion time by 39 percent on desktop. On mobile, even when users found the menu, they completed tasks 15 percent slower than with visible navigation.
That is the baseline penalty. Your navigation is already harder to find on a phone. If the labels that appear when the visitor opens the menu are ambiguous, they face a double problem. They worked to find the menu, and now they have to work to understand it.
67 percent of mobile users will leave a website entirely if the navigation frustrates them. Over half of all web traffic is mobile. On a small screen with limited patience, every word in your menu needs to earn its place. "Services" earns it. "The Lab" does not.
It is also an accessibility failure
WCAG 2.4.6 requires that headings and labels describe the topic or purpose of the content they refer to. A label that requires interpretation or cultural context to understand does not meet this standard.
67.7 percent of screen reader users navigate primarily by headings, according to the WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey. When a screen reader announces "The Lab," the user has no idea what content is behind that link. When it announces "Services," they know immediately.
Screen readers also have a feature that lists every link on a page. Without the visual context that sighted users rely on, creative labels lose whatever meaning they had. "Discover" could be anything. "Our Work" is specific. The label has to stand on its own, read aloud by a machine, to someone who cannot see the page.
Users with cognitive disabilities rely on predictable, consistent interfaces. Creative labels that require inference create barriers that go beyond inconvenience. For someone processing language differently, "The Lab" is not just unclear. It is a wall.
What good navigation looks like
Use the words your visitors already know. About. Services. Work. Contact. Pricing. Blog. These labels are not boring. They are functional. They describe the destination in one word and let the visitor decide without thinking.
When Conversion Rate Experts simplified the navigation for SFG20, removing ambiguity and aligning labels with user expectations, demo requests increased by 38 percent and clicks on menu links increased by 35 percent. Clear labels did not just improve usability. They improved revenue.
If you want to differentiate your brand, do it in the content, not the container. Write a compelling About page. Show exceptional work on your portfolio page. Build a services page that speaks directly to your customer's problem. The navigation is a signpost, not a statement. Nobody evaluates a building by its door handles.
Nobody has ever left a website because the menu was too clear.
The bottom line
Your navigation is not a branding exercise. It is a wayfinding system. When you rename "About" to "Our Story" or "Services" to "The Lab," you are asking every single visitor to decode your creativity before they can find what they came for. Jakob's Law is clear: people expect your site to work like every other site they use. Fight that expectation and you lose.
67% of mobile users will leave a site that frustrates them during navigation. That is not a design opinion. That is abandonment data. And it gets worse: vague or clever link labels fail WCAG 2.4.6, meaning your creative menu is also an accessibility violation. You are not just confusing visitors. You are excluding some of them entirely.
Save the personality for your copy, your imagery, and your tone of voice. Your menu labels should be so boring that nobody has to think about them. "About." "Services." "Contact." Clear always outperforms clever.
How we can help
Every website we build uses standard, tested navigation labels. The words your visitors expect, in the order they expect them. No guesswork. No translation. No clever labels that sound good in a design meeting and fail in the real world.
We build websites that score 90 or above on Google PageSpeed, meet WCAG AA accessibility standards, and are designed to convert visitors into customers. If your current navigation is costing you clicks, we can fix that.