![]() ![]() It’s easier for the visitor when there are more forks in the road, each with fewer choices, than when there is one fork in the road with an overwhelming number of options. Think of these pages as forks in the road. Often, it’s better to reduce or eliminate sub-menu items by creating a Path Split webpage which sits between the main menu and the visitors’ final destination. So let’s look at a way to decrease the number of sub-menu items. How many sub-menu items is too many? There’s no hard and fast rule, but in general, fewer is better. This catch-all link is usually labeled with a word like “Connect.” (Admittedly, our website has a catch-all link in the main menu, too it’s labeled “Resources.”) ![]() And, of course, just about every radio station website has a catch-all link in the menu where the designer shoved all the links that didn’t neatly fit anywhere else. The “Events” link often contains a sub-menu listing different types of events. A radio station might have a main menu item labeled, “DJs,” and hovering over it reveals a sub-menu with links to pages for all of the airstaff members. There are a few places where radio station websites commonly use sub-menus. Instead, I’m just going to ignore the thing that’s unfamiliar to me, so I’ll never find out what the “Class Outside Series” is. If I don’t know what the Detroit Tigers’ “Class Outside Series” is - and I don’t - the sub-menu provides me with no information. This is particularly problematic for casual fans who are visiting the website for the first time. ![]() The problem with sub-menus is that you can’t convey much information with them. As you can see with the Red Sox website, the large number of sub-menu items has decreased my confidence that I am navigating towards my desired destination. The most important thing is that they feel confident that they are moving in the right direction. As he has discovered during years of running usability tests on websites, it does not make a big difference whether it takes two clicks or four for a visitor to reach their desired destination. As Steve Krug points out in his excellent book on website design, Don’t Make Me Think, this is a misnomer. When a sub-menu contains too many links, it’s usually because the designer subscribes to a mistaken philosophy: The fewer clicks it takes to get to a page, the better. Here’s the sub-menu for the “Tickets” link on the Detroit Tigers (or did the team change its name to the “Detroit Roots”?!) website: To be fair to the Red Sox, this is owned by Major League Baseball, so all of the teams’ pages suffer from the same problem. At worst, it’s causing the Red Sox to lose thousands of dollars in revenue. At the very least, it’s frustrating Red Sox fans. Suddenly, I find myself asking all sorts of questions: If I want to take my whole family to a game, do I click on “Single Game Tickets” or “Group Tickets”? If I want to buy my tickets online, do I click “Digital Ticketing” or “StubHub”? Are “Theme Nights” also “Special Events”? And what the heck are “#Student9s”? Unfortunately, they stop me dead in my tracks by presenting 18 (!) sub-menu items that I now need to consider before whipping out my credit card. When I do that, I am sending a clear message to the Red Sox: “I want to give you money.” At this point, the job of the Red Sox website is to make it as easy as possible for me to give them money. In this case, I have moved my mouse cursor over the “Tickets” link. Sub-menus can seem like a good idea for the web designer who’s trying to find a place to put everything, but when they get bloated, they can be a horrendous experience for the website visitor. Here’s an example from the Boston Red Sox website: Sub-menus are the links that pop up when you hover your cursor above a menu item. ![]() …while we’re on the topic of things that Major League Baseball does wrong, let’s discuss website sub-menus. ![]()
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