

Home Articles Navbar Menus	Articles About KB

Navbars: Why Drill-Down Menus are Harmful

by Kristoffer Bohmann, June 24, 2001

Drill-down menus make interaction more difficult, destroy the user's overview, and poor wording make users give up using the site.

Tough Navigation on cellnetwork.com

Drill-down menus make interaction hard on cellnetwork.com:

Cell Network: Default navbar
Step 1. Spot default navbar on homepage.

Step 2. Hold mouse over a section in the navbar.

Step 3. Menu unfolds when user click section title (notice: the section title 'cell solutions' is not clickable).

Step 4. Only now can the user get what he wants (if he can find the non-standard links!).

Drill-down menus make it hard for users to interact with content on cellnetwork.com. Drill-down menus cause pain to the user experience in three major ways:

User interaction is harder compared to the standard point and click-method.
Getting a view of options provided by the entire site is tough.
Users leave the site if they don't understand the 2-3 words in section titles.

Harder Interaction

The ideal way to navigate a website is to point on a link and click. The navbar on cellnetwork.com does not support this interaction method. Instead, users have to figure out how to use the site's interaction method (see Tough Navigation on cellnetwork.com).

For instance, users expect section title to be clickable. They are not. Instead, a drill-down menu unfolds and users must waste time figuring out what to do with the menu.

Insufficient Overview

Options provided by the entire site are hard to get a view of on homepage. First of all, users with specific goals have a hard time figuring out where to begin. In fact, the site does a poor job engaging the user resulting in slower user performance and potential user frustration.

Cell Network: Navigation bar as presented on homepage (June, 2001)
Navigation bar as presented on the Cell Network homepage.

Assume the user is looking for an address. Most users will start looking for this information in the facts section since it is more prominent in the navbar than the office section. Impatient users don't want to waste time going back to the homepage to find the office section. Instead, they give up completing their task and are very likely to leave the next time they experience similar troubles.

Poor Wording is Fatal

How users comprehend each word in the navigation bar become critical when the section descriptions are limited to a few words. If users don't find the description obvious, they will not try looking for content in the section. This usability problem is similar to user problems with icons. Comprehendable icons are difficult to design; especially when the user population differs in terms of Internet experience and cultural background (Cell Network has offices 13 countries).

Unfortunately, the six section titles presented on the Cell Network navbar (see above) leave more questions than answers. Examples:

Overall: The word cell is repeated everywhere. Options would be more clear if the word was deleted. Further, text size is very small and cannot be increased - bad news for users with reading disabilities and users with very low display resolution.
"cell solutions": It is not obvious to newcomers what kind of solutions Cell Network provide.
"cell finance": The word finance can both be an offering and information about Cell Network's financial performance. Clarification is needed.
"cell news": Users should not be forced to click to see the latest news. List news stories on the homepage to provide instant overview of the latest corporate developments and make sure return users also see the news. Return users who are searching for a specific page will not bother clicking the news section.
"cell facts": It is not obvious to the user that cell facts is the About the company section (some users will mistakenly think cell offices and cell finance is the About section).

Bad Presentation of Each Section

The obvious solution is to present rigorous descriptions of each section. Yet this solution is frequently rejected since it doesn't match the aesthetical requirements managers and designers place on their sites. As a result, the site is designed more for aesthetical purposes than use. How the site looks become more important than how it works.

About the Author
Kristoffer Bohmann (biography) M.Sc. thinks and writes about high-quality user experiences. His philosophy: Users first. You can contact him at kristoffer@bohmann.dk.