The Navigation Treasure Trove: 37 Menu Usability Resources

Hannah Alvarez | June 17, 2014

Navigation can make or break the user experience on a website. If users can’t find what they’re looking for -- or if they can’t use the menu -- they’re likely to get frustrated and give up on the site.

Ugly or confusing navigation can certainly make you miss out on conversions -- but it also impacts the overall customer perception of your company. If visitors have a frustrating time trying to navigate your site, then you're missing out on an opportunity to delight your customers. And delighted customers are the ones who will make multiple purchases, leave positive reviews, and become advocates for your brand.

If you’re interested in improving your navigation usability, here are 37 resources to help you create a great experience for your users.

Categories:

General Menu Usability
Mobile Menu Usability
Testing and Analytics
Books
Courses and Presentations
Design Inspiration
Code and Tutorials

General Menu Usability

Five Expert Tips for Improving Your Navigation Menu

This article gives a great overview of some common-sense (but often underused) guidelines for menu design. Learn what the experts say about menu placement, use of visual information, and more.

Why Hover Menus Do Users More Harm than Good

Many well-intentioned websites use drop-down menus that expand when the user hovers over them. This article explains why this tends to cause frustration and confusion.

Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices

Drop-down menus get a lot of criticism for hindering usability, but sometimes they’re the best option. These tips will show you how to use drop-down menus for good, not evil.

Sticky Menus Are Quicker to Navigate

“Sticky” or fixed navigation menus can make a huge difference in a website’s usability. This post shows the pros and cons of switching to a sticky menu, along with some surprising statistics.

Hold the Hamburger

More and more websites are using the “hamburger” (the ubiquitous three-line symbol for a menu) to save space on the screen, but hiding the navigation options isn’t always the best idea -- especially for a desktop site.

Mega-Menus Gone Wrong

Large drop-down menus can easily fall into the trap of giving the user too many options or presenting the options in a confusing way. This article shows you what not to do if you’re using a drop-down menu.

UX Flows: Navigation

This post discusses navigation from a UX designer’s perspective and shows some creative alternatives to the traditional drop-down menu.

Top Navigation vs. Left Navigation: Which Works Better?

Not sure of the best location for your nav bar? Learn about scanning, visibility, and priority to decide which option is best for your site.

Designing a Winning Navigation Menu: Ideas and Inspirations

Browse through this collection of best practices, resources, and examples to get inspired to create a highly usable menu.

What Really Matters in Navigation Bar Usability

Take a look at the results from these real-life nav menu A/B tests. You might be surprised at what a difference a small change in copy or functionality can make.

Best Practices for Navigation on the Mobile Web

With mobile web traffic continuing to rise, creating a usable mobile experience is more important than ever. This article gives some basic guidelines on building menus for the small screen.

Responsive Design Menus: Problems and Proposals

Responsive design is a popular way to make a website work on multiple devices, but creating an effective menu within your responsive site can be a big challenge. Here are some ideas for building a responsive menu that works.

11 Ways to Improve the Navigation on Your Mobile Site

For e-commerce sites, a bad mobile experience equals a loss of sales. From one-click checkout to the 44x44 rule for links and buttons, this is a list of things retailers can do right now to make their mobile navigation more usable.

Mobile Navigation Menus and Great User Experience

This article shows how to make good use of the limited space on a mobile screen without confusing users. It also includes some user-friendly alternatives to the “hamburger” navigation symbol.

Mobile Menu A/B Tested: Hamburger Not the Best Choice?

What does mobile menu usability have to do with quantum physics? And is it better to use an icon or a word to label the menu? Find out in this post.

Responsive Menus: Enhancing Navigation on Mobile Websites

There’s more to mobile design than layout and speed. This article takes a deep dive into improving navigation -- code included!

Designing Your Menus for Optimal Usability

If you’re looking to improve the menu on your app, you’ve come to the right place. This post gives pointers on designing menus for mobile game apps.

UX Designers: Side Drawer Navigation Could Be Costing You Half Your User Engagement

The co-founder of TV app Zeebox shares the surprising result of what happened when his app switched from a top navigation to a hidden side drawer alternative.

Tree Testing for Effective Navigation

Tree testing is a great way to test your site structure. This article explains tree testing, using a company intranet as an example.

Using Card Sorting to Test Information Architecture

Card sorting allows you to find out how users would naturally expect a site to be organized. Learn when, why, and how to use this method of testing.

Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop offers tools for tree testing and card sorting. There are even free plans for folks who want to do smaller studies.

Designing Web Navigation by James Kalbach

This widely-respected bestseller discusses design principles, development techniques, and real examples for creating a usable navigation experience.

Card Sorting by Donna Spencer

This book takes an in-depth look at how to run a card sorting test, from planning the study to analyzing the results.

Organizing Mobile Web Experiences

Popular presenter Luke W. shows you realistic solutions for organizing your site’s navigation on a mobile screen.

Website Navigation - How to Get It Right for Customers

Check out the 9 tips in this quick presentation that you should keep in mind when designing your navigation experience.

Create Navigation Menus with jQuery

This intermediate-level online video course will get you up to speed with building menus using jQuery.

50 Beautiful and User-Friendly Navigation Menus

From super-simple to highly artistic, these menus have one thing in common: they’re very easy to understand and use.

20+ Responsive Mobile Navigation Inspirations

These responsive mobile sites are shining examples of what you can do with a navigation menu on the small screen.

45 User Friendly Navigation Menu Examples

These websites prove that you don’t have to sacrifice creativity to make a menu user-friendly.

31 Super Unique and Functional Website Navigation Menus

The navigation menu can play an important role in establishing a website’s character, as these examples do.

10 Examples of Beautiful Vertical Navigation to Inspire You

Design fans will appreciate the aesthetic appeal of these vertical nav menus.

Navbar Template for Bootstrap

The Navbar component in the Bootstrap framework gives you options for static and fixed (sticky) navigation bars.

CSS Navigation Bar

Learn how to build simple navigation bars using CSS in this beginner demo.

Creating a Floating Navigation Menu

Like the idea of using a sticky menu on your site? This tutorial will walk you through the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript you need to get started.

Menu-Aim jQuery Plugin

This plugin makes hover dropdown menus more usable by allowing the user to move the cursor to a submenu without accidentally collapsing it.

38 Free Open Source CSS Dropdown Navigation Menus

Want to copy and paste some CSS code rather than building your menu from scratch? Here are 38 basic menus that you can customize to suit your site.

100 Great CSS Menu Tutorials

Follow along with any of these 100 tutorials that will teach you how to create beautiful CSS menus.

Have a resource to add to the list?

If you have another useful navigation resource to share, let us know on Twitter.

If you found this article helpful, check out our Form Usability Treasure Trove and the SlideShare version of this article too!

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About this author:
Hannah is a content manager, dedicated to helping marketers and designers build amazing experiences. In her free time, she likes making things and going on adventures.