Menus & sitemaps

Navigation is a first-class part of the experience graph. Two entity kinds cover it: Menu for individual navigation structures, and Sitemap for the product's overall shape.

Menu entities

Create a menu from Create → Menu in Experience. A menu entity represents one navigation structure — the main nav, a footer, an account menu — and, like every entity, it has a stable short ID, a description of why it exists, and evidence links to research.

Menus relate to pages with navigates to relations, so the graph always knows which pages a menu can reach and, from the page side, which menus include a page (shown under Menu structures in the page editor).

The IA map editor

Opening a menu opens a visual IA map editor: a tree of the product's pages showing the L1/L2 hierarchy. Drag to restructure, add or remove entries, and see the information architecture as users will encounter it rather than as a flat list. Changes to the map update the menu's relations in the graph.

Sitemap entities

A Sitemap entity keeps the overall structure of the product — the top-to-bottom arrangement of pages that menus draw from. Use it as the single source of truth for structure discussions: where a new page belongs, what moves when a section splits, what gets retired.

Getting a head start

You rarely need to build navigation from scratch. Experience scan can propose pages and structure from a live site URL, or hypothesise a structure from a prompt — then you refine it in the IA map.

Next

• The experience graph
• Pages & structure
• Catalogs & taxonomies