101 UX Principles – 2nd edition - Second Edition

#71

Give Navigation Elements a Logical Tab Order

Try an experiment: head to a website in your browser and once the page has loaded, start pressing the Tab key repeatedly. You should notice the “focus” (usually a colored rectangle or shaded area) move from item to item across the site.

This is one of the ways that users who are partially sighted, or have motion difficulties, use web pages. These users rely on interface designers to use common sense in the tab order that they assign to items. On some websites and web apps, this is unusable, while on some, it’s clearly been well thought through.

Filling in a form is often extra frustrating when tapping the Tab key takes your focus to a strange part of the page. It’s unlikely that you’ll be writing ...