How Using Menu Links Can Benefit Your Website's Usability

by A Design Blogger

Websites are rarely singular pages, with all available information found on the homepage of a particular site. As such, they're made up of several - if not tens, or hundreds, or thousands, often found in the case of online shopping retailers and marketplaces, like Macy's or eBay - pages, each of which boast a unique URL, or the address found in the address bar atop web browsers.

Virtually every website that exists in today's world, at least those with multiple pages, include menus that provide users with shortcuts to various parts of the site they're visiting.

Different Syles Of Menus In Today's World Wide Web Consortium

The "hamburger menu" is arguably the most popular type of menu throughout today's Internet.

While the sidebar static navigation menu dominated the market several years ago, it's still found on a large portion of web pages today. Another type of popular menu is the drop-down, which is entirely self-explanatory. The sidebar static navigation menu, as its name implies, remains on the left or right side of the web browser throughout the entire site. This menu is arguably the easiest to use, as all options are available for viewing without having to hover your mouse over the menu icon, or otherwise expend any effort towards finding out what's actually on the menu.

So, What Is On The Menu?

Speaking of discovering what's on the menu, using hamburger menus does not lend convenience to visitors. Even though most sites tend to use hamburger menus - at least it seems to be like this - users experience difficulty in hovering their pointers over the menu, just to find out what the menus contain, then go back to their regular browsing habits.

Hamburger menus, however, do offer a few benefits. They conserve loads of screen space, arguably more than any other type of menu. Such symbols can also complement minimalistic designs, which are common in today's utilization of the world wide web.

All considered, most major websites - eBay, Twitter, and the like - don't use hamburger menus - you shouldn't use them, either.