The navigation menu helps the visitors beyond the homepage. Hence, it is one of the most important elements on a website. It becomes more important when seen from business point of view as if the navigation menu isn’t proper, the customers won’t be able to find what they are looking for and will abandon your site.
With the emerging use of mobile devices, the challenges also tend to rise for the mobile developers. And that is, how to design a good navigation menu for the visitors with limitations of mobile devices?
What makes a good menu?
Content is one of the factors for a good menu. Use a very simple language on your website that can be easily understood by the customers. Also, do not put plenty of options in front of customers. If you do so, they will feel confused and will abandon your site. The optimum number of options you must provide must be between to 4 to 7.
You must think about the correct area to place your menu buttons, like the right side of the desktop as many customers read from left to write.
Issues concerning mobile menus
Mobiles have comparatively smaller screens than desktops. Due to this, space is limited but menus are equally important.
A mobile user is always on the go and is always looking for something specific like directions, bank balance etc. Whatever they need must be immediate.
But when you ask a computer user to put his hands on mobile devices, he won’t work in the same way as he does on his computer. He will face many limitations in mobile compared to a PC.
To come up with a perfect solution, designers are working on different ideas and concepts.
Elements of good mobile menu
Below are some tips for the designing of an excellent navigation menu for mobile devices.
1.Make use of minimum number of menus and label them with very simple language. Also, limit the number of clicks on product options. Provide a useful search button so users can easily look for what they are searching for, and also a back button too.
2.Use stackable buttons for organizing menu buttons vertically instead of horizontally because mobile internet is portrait rather than landscape.
3.Make your menu creative by using icons instead of plain old list.
4.Place simple ‘menu’ button on the prominent area of you page with nested navigation menu.
5.The three-line menu that is becoming popular can be an alternative option. It is also adopted by sites like Facebook and web browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
6.Avoid horizontal scroll and make you icons big enough so that they can be tapped by your thumb.
Different types of menus can be used which depends on the purpose of the site. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution.
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