---
title: Orientation
slug: orientation
kind: principle
summary: Every screen silently answers three questions — where am I, how did I get here, where can I go next. Answer them and people feel confident; fail and they feel lost even when nothing is broken.
problem: A person cannot act until they know where they are. Disorientation does not look like an error; it looks like hesitation, re-checking, and asking a colleague whether the save worked.
principles: [orientation]
status: stable
visibility: public
related:
  - title: UX Principles Guide for Building Web Software
    url: /wiki/ux-principles-for-web-software
    summary: The customer-facing version of this principle, with side-by-side demos.
  - title: Master–Detail Drawer
    url: /patterns/master-detail-drawer
    summary: A pattern whose entire value is that it answers "where am I in this queue" continuously.
---

## The three questions

> **Where am I? How did I get here? Where can I go next?**

Every screen answers these whether you designed the answers or not. When the
answers are absent, people do not report a bug — the screen works. They just
move more slowly, re-check things, and lose trust in what they clicked.

## How to tell it is broken

Orientation failures are recognisable by behaviour, not by error rate:

- **Saving teleports.** A save throws the user to a list or a detail page, and
  the context they built is gone. The tell is someone asking *"did that
  save?"* — the answer left with the screen.
- **Dead ends.** No breadcrumb, no back, no obvious next action. The browser
  Back button becomes the primary navigation, which means the app has stopped
  navigating for the user.
- **Unnecessary redirects.** Each one is a place a person has to re-locate
  themselves.
- **Labels that describe the widget, not the outcome.** "Submit" and "New" tell
  you what the control is. "Save Invoice" and "Add Customer" tell you where you
  will be afterwards.

## What answers them

- **Persistent navigation and breadcrumbs** answer *where am I* structurally,
  so no screen has to answer it in prose.
- **Staying put on save**, and showing the change in place, answers *did that
  work* without a round trip.
- **A visible selected state** — the current nav item, the selected row — is the
  cheapest orientation there is, and the most often skipped.
- **Empty states that say what to do next** answer *where can I go* at exactly
  the moment a person has no other cue.
- **A record's identity in the page title**, so a tab, a bookmark and a shared
  link all still mean something an hour later.

## Where it shows up in this catalog

Orientation is the principle behind most of the **Orient** family, and it is the
hidden argument for several patterns filed elsewhere. The
[master–detail drawer](/patterns/master-detail-drawer) is worth its complexity
almost entirely because the list never moves, so *where am I in this queue* stays
answered across every inspection. The decision in
[drawer vs modal vs page](/patterns/drawer-vs-modal-vs-page) is really a decision
about which context you are willing to take away.

## The relationship to the other principles

Orientation is the one that fails **silently**. A friction problem shows up as
complaints about too many clicks; a disclosure problem shows up as "this page is
overwhelming". Disorientation shows up as people being slightly slower and
slightly less sure, forever, and nobody files that.