best-practices-for-designing-drop-down-menus
Design Articles

A website is merely pathetic if it doesn’t offer a user-friendly navigation. This is where drop-down menus are often considered to be a crucial aspect. However, from a web developer’s point of view, drop-down menus are distracting and create confusion for potential customers. On the other hand, designers believe that drop-down menus are significant in eradicating clutter from a web design.

Well, technically, yes. Using drop-down menus can turn out to be a time saving approach for visitors who like to grasp information in an easy picking way. But unfortunately, some silly mistakes ruin the entire menu design and reduce the website’s ability to satisfy searchers and search engines.

We will help you overcome such mistakes. And for this, we have shared best practices for designing drop-down menus. After doing justice with these below mentioned points, your site will surely be able to exemplify a customer-centric drop-down menu for its prospects.

So, let’s dive in…

  • Clear and Actionable Headings

One of the key purposes for using a drop-down menu is to demonstrate a large group of essential links in their respective categories. In order to assist users that which links fall into related categories, make sure to use headings so that all links can be grouped together in an organized way.

  • Whether It is a Hover or Clickable Menu, Make It User-Friendly

There is always a debate going on as which option is far better and results-driven from a user’s perspective. To be honest, we truly believe that whatever the option you have opted for, it should offer complete user-friendliness.

Some experts say that hover menu is more convenient, whereas others have an opinion that clickable drives more response because of its usability. Therefore, it’s better not to get involved in this war too much. Instead, pick an option and make it as easy as possible for the users.

  • Signify Your USPs

You should aim to save the time of your customers, and accentuating your USPs on the drop-down is one of the vital ways. As this way, you will be giving prominent room to your key products and making it easier for the potential customers to click on them directly through the menu.

  • The Shorter the Better

This strategy will certainly help you drive results. Because, majority of customers browse internet through smartphones or tablets, and too tall and descriptive menu will look annoying on their screens and spoil the entire interface of your web design eventually.

It is just because of the reason we recommend you to keep the drop-down menu short and simple for the ease of accessibility.