Drop Down Menus: An Information Architecture Conundrum
We’ve been working on the web redesign of a local community college for the past several months and as with any large, complex organization, the information architecture has been a bit more challenging than your average display site. Any time you try to formulate a simple, useable navigation schema while respecting the hierarchical structure of an academic organization and the sundry needs of students and faculty alike, you’re going to end up with a very deep site. Deep sites are problematic for various reasons: important pages can get lost in the bowels of the structure, navigation elements can become unwieldy as we try to design for six or seven levels of hierarchy, and the overall usability suffers and people get frustrated.
There are solutions to the deep site problem. A couple we’ve tried in the past include highlighting popular or important links in special “Quick Link” areas. Another was to create special persona-based “portals” that work alongside the deep hierarchy to promote important links to the top based on user profiles. The one solution we have always tried to avoid is the dreaded drop-down menu. In the 6 years I’ve worked here at PBDH I can’t remember a single project where we have recommended using drop-down menus. There’s been a couple projects where we were coerced into using them, but never without a good deal of “informed pushback” from us. Drop-down menus present all sorts of problems, from allowing users to skip over important pages, to removing any frame of reference, and mostly frustration at having to keep your mouse in the elusive “sweet spot” as you scan the link offering quickly before the menu disappears again.
So a few weeks ago our community college client came by the office with the results of a pretty extensive card-sorting exercise. We all headed down to the ideation lab and began pouring over the data. As expected, we were faced with the potential for more than 6 or 7 levels of hierarchy and all sorts of varied user needs. Eventually, as we sat there pondering the white board scribbles, the D-word came up. What about drop-downs? Could they actually work here? This time around they didn’t seem all that bad. Especially when we started calling them “flyouts”. Flyout menus sound sleek and purposeful. And there is a real-world distinction: we were envisioning large, multi-column menus that required little in the way of mouse dexterity to operate.
Flyouts make sense in this situation, especially since all of our top-level section index pages were essentially devoid of any real content—they would be reduced to, well, indexes. But, if we could create a section flyout for the first 3 levels and skip the index, we could save the user a lot of time clicking through to the meaty links and offer a nice section overview at a glance. (This is not a site concerned with a sequential narrative, so “stepping” the user through the content is not a requirement.) The file structure would remain hierarchical, with a browse-based interface built on top if it, and anything beyond the third level would become side navigation.
This sounded good. But what about all the anti-drop down usability studies out there? Usability experts are always coming out against the use of drop-down menus—and heck, we were too. Was this really a good idea? So we did some research and it turns out the king of all usability gurus, Jakob Nielsen, has recently published a pretty extensive study called Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well. (This is sort of like the Pope recommending that married couples start “seeing other people” to spice things up.) It’s a great read and there’s some good information on what to avoid when traveling down the path of the now renamed: Mega Drop-Down Menu.
From the article:
Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.
I’ll keep everyone posted on the progress and we’ll see if our assumptions about Mega Drop-Down Menus are correct.
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