Menu options
Designing and creating the menus to support navigation present several options, and
these are briefly described here. The main options are the following.1 Text menus, buttons or images
The site user can select menus by clicking on different objects. They can click on a basic
text hyperlink, underlined in blue, by default. It should be noted that these will be of
different sizes according to the size the user has selected to display the text. The use of
text menus only may make a site look primitive and reduce its graphic appeal.
Rectangular or oval buttons can be used to highlight menu options more distinctly.
Images can also be used to show menu options. For instance, customer service could be
denoted by a picture of a helpdesk. Whilst these are graphically appealing it may not be
obvious that they are menu options until the user positions the mouse over them. A
combination of text menu options and either buttons or images is usually the best com-
promise. This way users have the visual appeal of buttons or images, but also the faster
option of text – they can select these menus if they are waiting for graphical elements to
load, or if the images are turned off in the web browser. However, icons should have the
advantage that their understanding is not language-dependent.2 Rollovers
‘Rollover’ is the term used to describe colour changes – where the colour of the menu
option changes when the user positions the mouse over the menu option and then
changes again when the menu option is selected. Rollovers are useful in that they help
achieve the context referred to in the previous section, by highlighting the area of the
site the user is in.3 Positioning
Menus can be positioned at any of the edges of the screen, with left, bottom or top being
conventional for Western cultures. The main design aim is to keep the position consis-
tent between different parts of the site.4 Frames
Frames are a feature of HTML which enable menus to be positioned at one side of the
screen in a small area (frame) while the content of the page is displayed in the main
frame. Frames have their advocates and detractors, but they are still used on some
sites (e.g. http://www.tesco.com) which require particular functionality. Detractors point to
poor display speed, difficulties in indexing content in search engines and inflexibility
on positioning.5 Number of levels
In a hierarchical structure there could be as many as ten different levels, but for simplic-
ity it is normal to try and achieve a site structure with a nesting level of four or fewer.
Even in an electronic commerce shopping site with 20,000 products it should be possi-
ble to select a product at four menu levels. For example:
level 1 – drink;
level 2 – spirits;
level 3 – whisky;
level 4 – brand x.DESIGNING THE USER EXPERIENCEINMA_C07.QXD 17/5/06 4:23 pm Page 331