Menu Design

The primary goal for menu, form, and dialog box designers is to create a sensible, comprehensible, memorable, and convenient organization that is relevant to the user's tasks.

We can learn a few lessons by following the decomposition of a book into chapters, a computer program into modules, or the animal kingdom into species. These hierarchical decompositions are natural, comprehensible, and appealing to most people because every item belongs to a single category. This may lead us to create tree-like menu structures.

However, in some applications, an item may be difficult to classify as belonging to only one category. So, a menu designer may create duplicate pointers from different points in the menu system, thus forming a network structure.

Sometimes the list of menu options may be longer than can fit the number of lines on the video display. This can lead to scrolling menus. Rather than having to scroll down one long column, another options is to display all the options at once by providing multiple columns of menu items. This is sometimes called "fast and vast."

Sometimes, of course, menu items can lead to sub-menus with additional selections of that particular sub-category.

Menu tree structure: depth vs. breadth

The depth, or number of levels (sub-menus) of a menu tree; the breadth is the number of items per level.

If more items are put on the main level, the tree spreads out and there are fewer sub-levels.

Some authors urge using only four to eight items per menu, but at the same time using no more than three to four levels. With large applications, one or both of these guidelines will have to be compromised. You will need to make a tradeoff.

In several studies the evidence is that breadth should be preferred over depth. They suggest that designers should limit the depth to 3 levels because users can become lost or disoriented within the menu tree if the depth goes to four, five, or more levels.

Traditional Text vs. GUI

When computer systems were limited to traditional text display terminals, menus usually took the form of a numbered list. It is, however, becoming increasingly common to see applications that have a GUI interface. In the GUI environment a menu may be pulled down or popped up rather than take up an entire screen by itself. If a submenu is necessary it can be displayed adjacent to the main menu reducing the chances that the user will become lost or disoriented.