Taxonomy & Mega Menus... Part 3: Terminology

Best Practice #3: Use concise and precise terminology.

As I've mentioned in previous best practices (#1 Less is more and #2 Grouping and chunking), a lot of these design principles apply to any navigational construct -- using concise and intuitive labeling seems like a no-brainer. Given the textually charged interface and the amount of thinking you are asking people to do to navigate your site, mega menus simply force you to follow these rules more strictly.

Hunting and pecking for the right label to click on in a mega menu is no small task, so you really need to avoid the 2 major categories of labeling problems:

1. Excessive length & concatenation: 

When you're trying to cram 20+ links in a hover pane, every character counts. If you've got extraneous words in your labels that make your links harder to scan, or even worse cause wrapping (*gasp*), take out the scalpel and try some creative rewording or restructuring. Labels should be short, sweet and precise, leaving nothing to guessing. Call it what it is as simply as possible, don't try to be fancy - you'll just end up confusing users.

Additionally, avoid concatenating (joining) more than 2 items in one label. Laundry list labels (this, this, this & this) are much harder to scan, as you force the user to read all the way to the end before they can move on. We also recommend you avoid having too many concatenated items in one menu or group. Ampersand-farms can make a menu much harder to scan and it usually means that you have tried to put way too much in one category and need to think about restructuring.

Here's an example of some labelling that breaks these rules:

This menu has it all: wrapping, excessive concatenation... Look under the header "Organization": every label in that group has an ampersand, lumping 2 products together. This &-mania is a serious side-effect of mega-menus. The more you try to put your entire product catalog in one menu, the more you have to group things together to get it all to fit. Which brings me right back to best practice #1: less is more. If you end up with this much concatenation, you probably don't have your top-menu structure (level 1 taxonomy) correct and you should go back to the drawing board. In this case, we would recommend moving away form trying to put all office supplies in one tab and break out these categories of products at a higher level.

I've mentioned ambiguous labels in BP #2, so I'll just reiterate here that you should always try to use labels that are intuitive, meaningful, and just plain obvious. Looking at the example above, how wise is it to name a category "Office Resources" on an office supplies site? I mean, aren't they all office resources? What the heck does that mean? It's like having an electronics category at Radio Shack. Duh.

2. Repeating leading terms

It is a best practice in taxonomy development that each value be unique. This often leads to problems when you use your product taxonomy as navigation, as the elements that make a term unique often detract from the scanability of labels. For example, you might sell lots of different types of chargers: iPod & mp3 chargers, cell phone chargers, etc. At the taxonomy level, these need to be disambiguated, and it is usually also SEO best practice to be as specific as possible to raise your hit potential. However, when you expose these in navigation, it gets ugly. Imaging now your iPod & mp3 chargers in the overall iPod & mp3 accessories navigation:

iPod & mp3 Chargers
iPod & mp3 Cases
iPod & mp3 Headphones
iPod & mp3 Speakers

Looks redundant and overly texty, and you force the user to skip ahead visually to the end of the label to see the important part - what is it I want to buy? Sure, you might have great SEO, but your in-site navigation is bearing the burden.

Here's a great example:

We already know we're in the Cycling section, so the repetition of "Cycling" in front of each item is just redundant and visually cluttering the interface. It's a noise word. Same thing with Bike Accessories.

Here's an example of good practice:

The labeling in this menu is very clear... Labels are short and sweet, concatenation is used judiciously, no wrapping, no ambiguity, and it follows the other best practices around visual grouping and overall volume.

Again, if you're having trouble getting away from long labels, repetition and grouping, you've probably missed the mark at the top level of your taxonomy and need to do some restructuring. Mega menus are not a panacea for a messy taxonomy, they actually force you to be more economical and precise in language.

Consider our rapid-results taxonomy assessment if you're stuck with an overgrown mega-menu taxonomy and can't see a way out.

And stay tuned for the next post in the series: #4: Mega menu SEO implications