A Menu That Grew to Fourteen Items

When removal is not available

The standard advice for a long menu is to remove items, and it is right where items can go.

Frequently they cannot, because a business genuinely sells nine services and each has a page somebody needs to find.

At which point the question changes from what to remove to how to arrange, which is a different exercise.

Fourteen items grouped into five is navigable, and fourteen items in a row is not.

Group by what the customer wants

Rather than by how the business is organised internally.

Menus frequently reflect departments, or the order pages were built, or which manager wanted their section visible.

A customer does not know any of that and is looking for a task: get a price, find out whether you cover them, see whether you do this specific thing.

Group so that somebody with one of those tasks knows immediately which heading to open.

Where two items could sit under either of two headings, the grouping is wrong rather than the item, and the headings need renaming.

That is the whole of the exercise and it usually takes an hour with the pages listed on paper.

How to do the grouping

• Write every page on a separate card.
• Sort them into piles that belong together.
• Name each pile after what it is for.
• Aim for four or five piles.
• Redo any pile with one item in it.
• Ask somebody outside to sort them too.

The last is what makes it worth doing. Somebody who does not work in the business groups things the way a customer would, and where their piles differ from yours, theirs is usually the more useful arrangement.

Name the headings properly

Since a good grouping with vague labels helps nobody.

Services, Information, and Resources are containers rather than names, and a customer cannot tell which one holds what they want.

Name after the content: Repairs, Installations, Prices, Areas We Cover.

Use the words customers use rather than the words the trade uses, which frequently differ and which you can find in your own enquiry messages.

A heading somebody has to open to find out what is in it has failed, since the point of the grouping was to save them opening things.

Test by asking somebody where they would look for a specific page and seeing whether they choose right.

A worked example

A business had fourteen top-level menu items, which on a phone produced a list longer than the screen.

Nothing could be removed, since each was a service with genuine traffic.

Sorting them produced four groups: two kinds of work, a group about prices and areas, and one about the business itself.

A colleague from outside the trade sorted them differently in one respect, moving a page customers think of as a repair out of the installation group, and she was right.

The menu went to four items with groups beneath, and the phone version became a short list.

Traffic to the deeper pages rose, which suggested people had not been finding them before.

Dropdowns need care on a phone

Since the grouping has to work in both places.

A dropdown that opens on hover does not exist on a touchscreen, so a parent item must be openable by tapping.

A parent that is also a link creates an ambiguity: tapping it might open the group or go to the page.

Resolve it by making the parent a heading rather than a link, with a page of its own listed first inside the group if one exists.

And keep nesting to one level, since a second level of dropdown is unusable on a phone and barely usable anywhere.

The footer takes the rest

Which is what makes a four-item menu possible.

Terms, privacy, careers, accessibility, the full service list, and anything else somebody looks for deliberately belongs in the footer.

People know to look there, which is a genuine convention rather than a hope.

That removes several items from the menu without removing them from the site.

A full list of every page in the footer also helps anybody who could not find something in the grouping, which is the useful fallback.

Show where they are

Since a grouped menu means somebody is now inside a structure.

Mark the current section in the menu, so somebody can see which group they are in.

That is a small styling change and it prevents the disorientation that grouping otherwise introduces.

On a deeper site, a trail showing the path is worth adding, though for four groups the marked menu item is usually enough.

Check it on a phone, where the menu is closed and the indication has to come from the page instead.

Check what people actually click

Before or after the rearranging, since opinion about menus is plentiful and evidence is available.

Most analytics can show which menu items are used, and the answer usually surprises people.

Two or three items typically carry most of the clicks, several carry almost none, and one that everybody argued about turns out to be used by nobody.

Use that to decide which pages stay at the top level and which can move into a group or the footer.

Then check again a month after the change, since the point is to find out whether the new arrangement helped rather than to assume it did.

The counter-case

Grouping has costs.

Every group adds a click, so a page that was one tap away is now two, and for the most important pages that is a loss.

Keep your two or three most valuable destinations at the top level regardless of how tidy the grouping would be, since navigation serves the business as well as the customer.

And a site with seven items does not need this at all.

Sort the pages into four or five named piles, have somebody outside check the sort, and move the rest to the footer.

The hour

1. Write each page on a card.
2. Sort into four or five piles.
3. Name each after its content.
4. Have an outsider sort them too.
5. Keep your best pages at the top level.
6. Move the rest to the footer.
7. Mark the current section.

Step four is what stops this being a rearrangement of your own assumptions, since the person who does not work in the business sorts the way a customer does.

Deciding what belongs there at all is covered in menus with too many things in them.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.