Mataupu
If you have a website for your restaurant, or you have a gastronomy blog, this article interests you.
I admit the title is a bit misleading – there is no perfect recipe for a navigation menu. Websites are different, they all have different shapes, sizes and goals and it is impossible to come up with just one way to find the ‘recipe for success’.
I am not going to give you the perfect recipe for your navigation menu, but I will give you the basic principles and tools that you can use to create the perfect menu for your website, and that you will be able to continue improving it over time.
The main key: use the right words
The navigation menu of your website is not a place for you to unleash your creativity. You only have a few spaces that you can work with, and with each of them you have to get your visitor to navigate.
This means that each word, or section of your menu must play a very important role in making it totally clear to your reader about what they will find when they click there. If not, no one will click on that word.
This does not mean that you should discard all the generic words that you see in almost all the menus. Sometimes if you don’t use them, customers can get lost and bewildered.
Try searching for synonyms or words related to them.
How do you know if your words and their order are optimal? I recommend that you make small cards with different names, and physically organize them on your desk and see how they turn out.
The best way is to see it physically. If possible, ask for opinions from third parties outside your website.
When we create a website, the biggest challenge, whether you are an expert at it or not, is how easy we will take for granted the things that others understand about what we, as creators, do on the website.
That is, you may see a logic when using a certain order or words, but other people will be confused. And you have taken for granted that what you think, others think.
How to eliminate that hateful uncertainty?
Let’s say you have already set the main navigation menu, and your programmer (or yourself) has already published it on the web. How do you know if your audience understands and likes it?
Asking.
I explain some methods for you to ask or find out.
You can start with a small survey. For this I recommend using SurveyMonkey, it is one of the best applications for this and they have free packages.
In a simple survey, ask your readers what they are looking for when they visit your website, it does not matter if it is your restaurant or your Mexican cuisine blog (for example), how they find it, and if the navigation menu it helps them find it or not.
How do you get them to respond? Bribe them. “Do you want to refill your soda as many times as you want? Fill out this survey to get the coupon ”.
You can offer a discount, free drink, something attractive to your potential diners.
Fewer options work better
The Harvard Business Review published a very interesting study just over ten years ago on how people choose in relation to the number of options presented to them. The study is still valid today.
They brought together two groups of people: one was given six jams to choose from, while the other was given twenty-four jams to choose from.
The results are astonishing: the buyers in the group with only six options were 600% more willing to buy a jam than the group with 24 options.
In other words: the group with many options to choose from, they are 600% less likely to choose something.
This is a classic example of Hick’s Law: the time it takes to make a decision increases as we have more options to choose from. And on a web page, this is death.
Regarding this law, there is another study by Chartbeat, which found that more than half of your visitors will leave your website after fifteen seconds or less. Wow, you can’t waste their time.
Instead of a navigation menu with a dozen options, with many accordion or dropdown effects, within others, etc., limit yourself to a handful of very important options for your business.
Do not overload your menus: you will lose a lot.
It is impossible to tell you how many items are too few or too many. You will have to do tests to find the optimal one for your business.
Perhaps your designer, or yourself, you have seen that the drop-down menus or hamburger menus (those that are not visible, and that are only shown by clicking an icon, usually three lines) can be useful for the categories of recipes, for example.
But like I told you before: you should always consider your reader’s perspective before doing so. Your restaurant page is made for your visitors, not for you. Although sometimes you don’t like things that work.
When your web page loads, it doesn’t have to be obvious to anyone that there is a drop-down menu or hidden inside a main menu button or word. Not all are digital natives.
For some people it can be confusing or annoying to have options in the options that are presented to them, and many of these people will give up and walk away.
Sometimes creating a page with all the elements with an image and a button is more effective than a drop-down menu, for example.
If your target audience is young in your restaurant, you may not have this problem.
Don’t just ask: spy on your customers
In addition to surveys, it is very good to spy on your visitors.
There are tools that do it and you can generate two elements that are pure gold for you as the owner, and for your designer: heat maps and recording of what your visitors do on your page.
The best tool, without a doubt, is HotJar: it records the activity on your website during a certain period of time, and then it shows you exactly where people click and how often, visually … what we know as a heat map .
It also records complete sessions of your visitors: you will see in real time how they read, when they do tusi, and when do they leave, etc. This way you will know if your navigation menu works … among many other things that you may not have been looking for.
The tool is free, although it has very interesting paid versions.
Conclusion: less is more
There are countless designs for your navigation menu: drop-down, hamburger, the mammoth mega menus, etc.
But, despite so much variety and spectacularity, studies show that the key is simplicity, not giving the visitor time, and giving him only what is most important.
And of course: ask them … or spy on them.