Priority plus navigation

Priority plus navigation is a rule for spending width. The links are put in priority order, the bar shows as many as the room allows, and everything past the cut goes into a More control that holds exactly those items, in exactly that order. When the window changes size the sum is done again, so the same nav shows six links on a laptop, three on a tablet and one beside More on a phone. Brad Frost gave it the name, and the plus is doing real work in it: the promise is the top priorities plus a way to reach the rest.

What separates it from every other responsive nav is that the ranking is an explicit design decision rather than a side effect of source order. Someone has to say which link is first and which is last, and the pattern then makes that judgement visible at every width: the narrower the screen, the more clearly the bar states what the product thinks matters. The alternative most sites reach for is putting the whole nav behind a hamburger menu at small sizes, which is cheaper to build and gives back nothing at all: on a narrow screen, one visible link plus More still beats zero visible links plus a symbol.

The More control is an overflow menu, and that is the mechanism rather than the pattern: the overflow menu is a place actions go, priority plus is the rule that decides which ones go there and when. Two navigation terms sit nearby and neither one is this. Utility navigation is a set defined by what its links are about, the reader’s own tools rather than the site’s content, and it keeps that identity at every width. Local navigation is a set defined by where the reader is standing, replaced wholesale when they move section. Priority plus does not care what the links are about at all: it only asks how many of them fit.

Three details decide whether an implementation is pleasant or maddening. Recalculate on anything that changes the sum, which means text size and font loading as well as window width. Add hysteresis so a link does not flicker between the bar and the menu while someone drags a window edge across the boundary. And when the page the reader is on has fallen into the overflow, mark the More control as current, because a nav that quietly stops showing where you are has lost the one job it had.