Giant menu's - how retailers are approaching navigation
Posted on 25 Nov 2011 by @jaredfrere
E-consultancy has a nice little article dissecting 25 mega menus being employed by retailers.
With the first sentence grabbing me straight away mentioning that they were the favoured navigation of the usablity expoert himself Jakon Nielsen
With the rise and rise of online retail I have noticed this trend more and more. In Australia we are faced with a small number of retailers selling a large number of products (think Myer, David Jones, Coles, Woolworths) and its only a matter of time that these retailers get online properly.
For the casual but time poor browser the mega menu provides an immediate glance at the entire navigation all from the homepage and is perfectly suited to sites with a large number of pages. All sites strive to increase dwell time and cross promote pages. With the mega menu in many cases you cut out the need to use the search bar, while still being able to create a very short user path to the desired item/page. All the while still exposing the user to the other offerings available on the site.
Once place I see mega menu's also being useful is on newspaper sites. It makes sense that a mega menu can display all the content of a newspaper in the one container allowing the user to select their desired category. This allows the user through the header navigation to navigate the site even more easily than they would a real paper easily skipping through the sections that matter most (sport > headlines > entertainment)
However its important to note that many examples of these giant menu's are activated on roll over with the user then selecting the desired category, something not suited to touch devices. So to use one properly this should be activated on click/touch and then the user can select the desired category.