Business Websites Blog - Corporate Web Design, Search Engine Strategies

Death by Drop-Down Menu

Location: Blogs The Business Websites Blog
Posted by: Lori McDonald	4/3/2008 2:57 PM
Recently we had a conversation about the use of drop-down menus as a method of navigation on the web. They are certainly in use on a lot of websites these days and overall I think they are a beneficial tool on the internet. However, I believe that if you have to pick more than 2 choices on a drop down before you click and get to a page - the drop down is probably too complicated. I do realize there is another school of thought that says you want to allow your users to get to a page in as few clicks as possible and so some would say that to do that, you should make your drop down menus cascade several levels deep so they can get to any page in just 1 or 2 clicks. While I understand the sentiment (and I agree that getting places easily is important) I think drop-downs with more than 2 nested levels are hard for many internet users to navigate. Here are some interesting articles that talk about drop down menus. http://www.uie.com/articles/users_decide_first/ This article talks about how users in a usability study often decide where they want to go before hovering over an area on the menu, and then when they go to the menu they confused by the additional options given to them in a drop down. http://www.allchorn.com/2008/02/19/effective-website-navigation-systems/ One interesting comment under the heading "Horizontal with Dropdown and Multi Level” is “Feeling frisky with this dropdown thing? Go another level, but stop there. Getting too dropdown happy can create an annoying user experience with usability becoming an issue. Imagine following a trail of dropdowns and you lose the focus and have to start again at the beginning. Not worth the aggravation in my opinion.” http://www.eastonmass.net/tullis/WebsiteNavigation/WebsiteNavigationPaper.htm This study talks about drop downs and fly out menus. So if we are talking about a horizontal menu the first level would be a "drop down" (because it is drops down vertically) and a second level would be"fly out" menu. This shows that the fly out menus have the highest error rate. There are many opinions out there. Some would say you shouldn’t use drop downs at all due to the usability issues. I don’t agree with that. But I do think that having too much in your drop down can cause issues for users.

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