How people are moved through a page
Navigation
The strange route is being abandoned. Menus you have to work out have fallen from 11.1% of earlier winners to 5.8% of the newest 120, a third of them gone — while header design, the plainest furniture on a page, is climbing at 1.8 times the old rate.
The short version
- 1Use a plain, labeled menu.
Simple menus and well-made headers are rising among new winners.
- 2Design the footer.
It is the fastest-rising part of the page.
- 3Unusual menus score just as well.
Judges mark them the same for usability, and slightly higher for creativity.
- 4The field is dropping them anyway.
Menus you have to work out have fallen by about half among the newest winners.
- 5Put the invention in what people touch.
Keep the route plain and spend the ambition on what visitors handle once they arrive.
- 6Match the route to the subject.
Film, art and games use unusual routes most. Among photo and video sites, not one does.
The detail
The finding
Unusual Navigation Scores Just as Well
The common assumption is that unconventional navigation hurts usability — that making people learn your menu costs you visitors. The scores from Awwwards judges say otherwise.
The usability gap is -0.012 of a point across 39 sites against 381 — statistically indistinguishable from no gap at all, with a confidence interval straddling zero. The creativity gap runs the other way and is real: +0.17, with a 95% interval of 0.05 to 0.29 that does not cross zero.
The trade-off everyone assumes — that unusual menus hurt usability — is not in the data. At this level, making visitors learn the navigation costs nothing in usability and gains a real creativity bonus.
The caveat that matters more than the finding: every site counted here won something. A project whose unusual navigation simply confused people never made it into this set. This does not tell you unusual navigation is safe in general — it tells you that among work good enough to win, judges do not penalize it for being unusual.
And yet
The Field Is Dropping It Anyway
Routes you have to work out have fallen from 11.1% of earlier winners to 5.8% of the newest 120 — a third of them gone. What is climbing in their place is the least glamorous furniture on a web page.
Rising
Falling
earlier winners· newest 120·share of sites carrying each
The fastest riser is header design at 1.77 times — the top of the page treated as a designed thing. A footer is the part of a page nobody photographs, and it is being designed with more care than it has had in years. Beside it the ordinary labelled menu and the header, both up.
Read together, the rising set is a page telling you where you are and how to leave. The falling set is a page asking you to find out.
The split inside it
Disorientation Out, Handling In
It would be easy to read this as expressive navigation dying and convention winning. That is not what the numbers say, because the two most expressive patterns move in opposite directions.
Routes you must work out: 0.53×. Things you drag, hold and point at: 0.80×. One is falling and the other is rising, and both are unmistakably ambitious. What separates them is whether the ambition is spent on where things are or on what happens when you touch them.
That is the shape of the change. The map is going back to being legible; the surface is becoming more responsive. You are told where you are, and then given something worth handling once you are there. The experiment moved from wayfinding into the material.
By what the site is for
The Stranger the Subject, the Stranger the Route
Gleec Chat8.01
20 Years of Xbox Museum7.93
Welcome To The Continent7.80
Má Sài Gòn (Space)7.73
Sortie en mer (a trip out to sea)7.71
iyO7.68
Winners whose route you have to work out. Every figure on this page is about these.
The rate runs from 16% in film & tv down to 0% in photo & video — where 41 winners produced not one route a visitor has to work out.
Film & TV runs at 16% and Photo & Video at 0%. The pattern behind that is not difficulty or budget. It is whether the navigating is part of the thing being sold. Where the site IS the experience — art, film, campaigns, games — the route is fair game and being made to explore is the point. Where the work is the point and the site is its container, navigation gets out of the way, because nobody browsing photographs wants the menu to be the memorable part.
Where this goes
What to Build Now
The safe reading of all of this is not "be conventional". It is be conventional about position and adventurous about substance. Spend the plain menu, the real header, the working footer — they are rising, they are cheap, and nothing on this page suggests they cost you a creative mark. Then put the invention into what the visitor handles once they have arrived.
If a project wants a route people must learn, the marks give no reason not to — provided the rest of the work is at this standard. That is the whole condition, and it is doing more work in that sentence than the finding is.
714 confirmed winners; 420 of them carry published jury marks, which is where the usability and creativity figures come from. Movement is recent winners against older ones, so the only thing separating the two sides is when a site won. Genre figures need at least 28 winners in a genre before they appear.