I'm not the kind of person who believes in "moments of awakening." For me, things arrive slowly, through years of getting it wrong and then realizing I was wrong.
After 15 years of designing user experiences, I started out like every other designer — convinced that a beautiful interface could solve almost any problem. I studied typography carefully, read about grid systems, spent hours tweaking the spacing between letters. I was proud of products that looked refined.
But one thing kept nagging at me: the websites I built looked good, yet the numbers didn't. Bounce rates were high. Users couldn't find what they needed. Clients came back with complaints, and I usually blamed marketing, blamed the developer, or blamed the users themselves for "not being used to the new design yet."
One day, my mom asked me to find the phone number of a clinic on its website. I opened the page — the kind of page that, if a colleague had made it, I would've called "clean and minimal." She stared at the screen for a moment and asked:
"What's that three-line button, son?"
I couldn't answer right away. I had designed the hamburger menu hundreds of times, and it had never crossed my mind that someone might not know it was a menu.
That day, the two of us spent nearly ten minutes hunting for a phone number.
A small thing, really, but it stayed with me for a long time.
After that, I started paying more attention whenever I watched other people use websites — friends, family, colleagues from outside the industry. I noticed something I had been missing for years: most of the time, when users got confused, it wasn't because the design was ugly. It was because they didn't know where they were on the site, didn't know where they could go next, and didn't know how to get back.
Navigation. Always navigation.
I don't think I was the first person to notice this — plenty of people have surely written about it for years. It just took me a long time to actually see it in my own work.
I went back and looked at my old projects. A lot of the sites I had been proud of aesthetically turned out to have pretty tangled navigation. Multi-level menus, vague labels, important items hidden behind icons that users had to guess at. I had poured so much effort into details few people noticed, while the things that directly shaped the experience were treated like an afterthought.
It wasn't a comfortable conclusion. It meant that much of my work over the years had probably helped people less than I'd thought.
I decided to build a tool focused on exactly that part — navigation, nothing else. I called it Navi+ AI Menu Builder. There's no grand philosophy behind the name; it just describes what it does.
I'm not a strong developer. The early days were hard, and there were plenty of moments when I wondered whether anyone actually needed a product that did only navigation. The market seemed to prefer flashier things — beautiful templates, animations, AI builders.
But little by little, I started getting messages from users. A small shop owner said the new menu made it easier for customers to find products. A merchant told me his mother had bought something from his website by herself for the first time. Nothing explosive, just small, concrete improvements in the places where users used to get stuck.
For me, that was enough reason to keep going.
I still have a lot to learn. Navi+ AI Menu Builder isn't perfect — there are plenty of features I want to do better, and plenty of feedback I haven't had time to address. But I no longer try to convince myself that a beautiful interface is enough. Fifteen years in this craft taught me something simple: if users can't find their way, nothing else really matters.
That's all I'm trying to get right — just that one thing.
— Khoi
If you'd like to try Navi+ AI Menu Builder, you can take a look at the homepage or read the documentation.