Local navigation

Local navigation changes when you change section; global navigation does not. A local nav lists the pages that live alongside and beneath the one you are on, so its contents are a function of your position: the billing section shows plans, invoices and payment methods, and the moment you move to the team section that list is replaced wholesale. Together with a global nav and the utility links (account, help, sign out) that usually sit in the far corner, it makes up the three part navigation family most products converge on.

What it is actually for is depth. A global nav can only ever advertise a top tier, and without a second control the tiers below it are invisible until you land in one. Local navigation shows a reader the shape of the room they are standing in: how many siblings the current page has, whether it has children, and roughly how much more there is. NN/g’s argument for it is that this orientation is separable from wayfinding, and that removing it forces every move within a section back through a landing page. It is also the control that makes a section feel like a place rather than a URL prefix.

It is usually a vertical rail, and often the same sidebar component the global nav uses on a wide window, which is exactly why the two get conflated in code. The test is not where it is docked but whether the list survives a move to another section. Where a section has only a handful of peers and they are genuinely alternate views of one thing, tabs do the same job in a horizontal strip. Where the “section” is a single long document, the local nav collapses into a table of contents driven by scroll spy, and its current marker tracks a scroll position rather than a page.

Two failure modes are worth watching for. The first is a rail that changes silently: if the list is replaced when a reader moves and nothing says which section it now belongs to, the change reads as the interface losing their place, so the rail should be headed by the name of the section it describes. The second is duplication. Local navigation answers “what else is here”, breadcrumbs answer “how did I get here”, and a current page indicator answers “where am I”. Building all three to say the same thing is a common way to spend a quarter of the screen on redundancy.