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Menu terminology can cause user confusion,
regardless of how well structured and laid out the
menus may be. At times, there are commands that seem
very similar and yet have very different meanings.
—Mandel
(1997)
Just because a system has menu
choices written with English words, phrases, or
sentences, it is not guaranteed to be comprehensible.
Individual words may not be familiar to some users,
and often two menu items may appear to satisfy the
users’ needs, whereas only one does.
...
Ensure that items are distinct
from one another. Each item should be distinguished
clearly from other items. For example,
Slow tours of the
countryside, Journeys with visits to parks, and
Leisurely voyages are less distinctive than Bike
tours, Train tours to national parks, and Cruise ship
tours.
...
Bring the keyword to the left:
Try to write menu items so that the first word aids
the user in recognizing and discriminating among
items. Users scan menu items from left to right; if
the first word indicates that this item is not
relevant, they can begin scanning the next item. —Shneiderman
(1992)
Use consistent and concise
phrasing. The collection of items should be
reviewed to ensure consistency and conciseness. Users
are likely to feel more comfortable and be more
successful with Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral than
with Information about animals, Vegetable choices you
can make, and Viewing mineral categories. —Shneiderman
(1992)
If the main purpose of menus were
to execute commands, terseness would be a virtue. But
because the main justification of their existence is
to teach us about what is available, how to get it
and what shortcuts are available, terseness is really
the exact opposite of what we need. Our menus have to
explain what a given function does, not just where to
invoke it. Because of this, it behooves us to be
more verbose in our menu item text. We shouldn’t
say Open… but rather Open the Report. We shouldn’t
say Auto-arrange but rather Auto-arrange the icons.
We should stay far away from jargon as our menu’s
users won’t be acquainted with it. —Cooper
(1995)
Provide a list of shortcut links to
your best-selling items and/or those that users most
frequently navigate to. Shortcuts minimize the time
and effort users spend navigating, allowing users
to bypass the site’s hierarchy. —IBM (1999)
Allow branches of a hierarchy to
converge on a single node when the node fits
logically under two (or more) branches and you
anticipate that large numbers of users will look for
it in both places. … Write nodes in converging
branches in a modular style so that they fit the
context of both branches….
Often designers must provide
multiple views of the same content to support
different user tasks. —Farkas and Farkas
(2000)
Promote topics, articles, guests,
or features specifically and dynamically
(for example, "This week, Jon Stamos on Freudianism
in TVTalk") as opposed to generically promoting a
section of content (for example "See stars in TVTalk").
… Use distinguishing adjectives to label special
versions of common Internet activities (for example,
Kids Chat or News Chat). —Keeker
(1997)
See bibliography:
Conklin (1987a),
Cooper
(1995), Farkas and Farkas (2000),
Keeker (1997),
Mandel (1997),
Shneiderman (1992),
Shneiderman and Kearsley (1989)
Examples
Menu Items
Before
Introduction
Preliminaries
Background Info
Blossoming
After
Who the Ainu are
Where the Ainu come from
How the Ainu were attacked
How the Ainu became a tourist attraction
Before
A delicacy for some— fish, raw, in slices
Swallowing the eyes of fish
Another special dish: eggs of codfish, broiled
After
Sliced raw fish
Fish eyes
Broiled codfish eggs
Before: Menu item :
Form letters
Title on target page: Mail merge
After: Menu item: Creating form letters
Title: Creating form letters
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Other ways to make your
menus meaningful:
6b. Write each menu so it
offers a meaningful structure.
6c. Offer multiple routes
to the same information.
6d. Write and display
several levels at once.
6e. When users arrive at
the target, make it obvious.
6f. Confirm the
location by showing its position in the hierarchy.
Resources on menus
Taking a
Position on Menus
Heuristic
Online Text (H. O. T.) Evaluation of Menus
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