Five Things About ... Mega Menus (Day 5)

Day 5: The Journey of a Thousand Miles

Over the past four days, we've taken a good look at a web design trend that continues to be hot. There are still many web sites out there that could easily take advantage of this IA/design element. Mega menus aren't particularly complex; they just require some planning, consideration of users and their habits, and careful testing.

Throughout this, we've discussed mega menus mostly from an information architecture and visual design perspective. This was done on purpose. While it may seem to some that the hard part is programming the mega menu and implementing it on the web site, that's actually fairly straightforward. It's not easy, per se, but it's not complex. The complexity comes in the planning and design stages.

The next step is to implement the code, which is going to use JavaScript. Specifically, all of this is much easier to do with jQuery, a JavaScript library. There are a lot of jQuery packages that will help programmers implement their designs, and in my opinion, there's absolutely no sense in reinventing the wheel. (I'd rather spend the time going on to create new wheels, or maybe to drive in the car I've made out of all the wheels I've implemented.) I tend to use Joel Birch's superfish, but there are a lot out there, as 1stwebdesigner has taken the time to enumerate. While implementing the code, just make sure to stick to the plan and, if there are any changes to be made, try to go back to the planning stage and rework the diagrams rather than just continue to modify the code. Often reworked code can begin to produce unexpected behaviors, which increases the cost of implementation due to testing and debugging.

2011 looks to be an exciting time for mega menus. As mega menus become more popular, designers will be pushing the boundaries. As long as they stay within the guiding principle -- increase usability by providing visually intuitive ways to display organized content -- then the results should be interesting and educational. Personally, I can't wait to see what people come up with.