Navigation — what we decided

[CharlotteDowns]

We’re confident that the new component is an improvement on the ‘GOV.UK header with navigation’, which we’ll deprecate in the next breaking release of GOV.UK Frontend.

Indicate ‘current’ navigation item

Our users may wish to remove the link and change the style of the active navigation item when an end user is on that specific sub section. We have provided the option to remove the link from the Navigation item but we have not introduced custom styles to show this, leaving that decision to the discretion of the service teams and their end users. As always we would appreciate any opportunity to upstream positive findings. Read more about our work in Add conditional styles for different active states of the navigation items #3930

Colour contrast of navigation items

We looked to increase the legibility of Navigation items by experimenting with colour and font weight. We used the new APCA method for colour contrast to help us decide, our final decision was to make the Navigation item text colour 10% darker than the govuk-colour("blue"), read more about our other considerations in Test and document alternative solutions to increasing the font weight #3964.

Including a component for further sub-navigation

Early on in the scoping of our Navigation contribution we decided not to include sub-navigation or ‘level 3’ navigation in order to build a well informed main navigation. However we do understand that these elements need to be coupled and would appreciate examples, user research and ideas to inform our future work.