Image ©2025 ux-qa.comNavigation Depth

What is Navigation Depth?

Navigation Depth quantifies the number of navigational interactions like clicks, taps, screen/page transitions a user takes achieving a goal.

This is also known as click depth, but as interfaces have evolved the implications of interaction involve than clicks of a mouse.

These metrics help identify how deeply users explore content or features within a digital experience, calculated by merging data, rather than tracking a single data point.

Part of the reason for formatting these posts like an AI response is to provide consistent depth of navigation for each entry. I do save the thesis for last, but not at the expense of needless scroll depth.

What is the Formula for Navigation Depth?

There is no single universal formula for calculating Navigation Depth, because its definition can vary depending on the context and goal of your analysis.

AI will give you some formulas for "Calculating Click Depth and Navigation Depth", but the answer is a hallucination in my experience.

What are Common Formulas for Navigation Depth?

How to Measure Hierarchical Depth

Measure the deepest level in a site or app's information architecture reached during a session.

Example:

• Home - Level 1
• Category - Level 2
• Product - Level 3
• Checkout - Level 4

Tag or define the depth level of each page in your content hierarchy.

What is Click Sequence Length?

Count the number of sequential steps, clicks, or transitions in a session.

Example: 

A user revisits the same page multiple times; count all steps, not just unique pages.

Incorporating Path Length

Simply count how many unique screens or pages were visited in a session.

This can be weighed against path length numbers in ideal screen flows and user journeys for completing the task.

Normally, design changes are the standard measurement for altering path length.

Which Formula should I use for Navigational Depth?

User engagement

Longest engaged sequential path, time on screen, time on task.

Information architecture efficiency

Use hierarchical depth to illustrate the validity and efficiency of IA.

Page discovery

Use count of unique pages visited, pages never accessed.

Common Data Used to Find Navigation Depth

• Session logs
• Page transitions
• Mapped pages to hierarchy levels