How to Simplify Navigation through Responsive Menus in Mobile Website Design?

Responsive website design is now a widespread concept in the industry – thanks to the rising popularity of smartphones and mobile web technologies. The entire focus of responsive websites is to ensure finest viewing experience by combining a fluid layout and media queries to fit different screen sizes. The ability to easily read and navigate with minimum resizing, panning and scrolling across a wide range of devices makes responsive websites ideal for this post-PC age.

Responsive Navigation Menus – Enhancing User Experience

Responsive menus are the key to successful mobile websites. With the help of CSS media queries, the task of designing responsive navigation links becomes easier. There are different points to consider when designing a responsive menu, such as having a different style, different content or different location on the page. Adapting to a responsive menu not only simplifies the navigation but also enhances the design and the user experience.

To understand how to use responsive menus for superior navigation and user experience, we present 4 easy approaches –

• Changing the visual design to fit narrower screens – The screen resolution of smartphones and tablets are smaller than that of PCs and laptops. This means that, when viewed on the narrower screens, the visuals wouldn’t be as appealing as they are otherwise. This is why, adjusting the visual design to portrait and landscape modes can help a lot.

•  Improving tappability of navigation links for touch devices – In smaller devices, mouse is replaced by the thumb, which is relatively bigger in size. Tapping on the small links with the thumb sometimes doesn’t always take us to the right link. This is why adjusting the size of the navigation links using CSS and making them look like buttons greatly improve their tappability.

• Adjusting the location of the menu – The placement of the menu bar is also an important factor when focusing on simpler navigation and better user experience on mobile devices. On small screen devices such as mobile phones, relocating the menu to the bottom of the page (above the footer) makes sense because when the user has finished reading that page, they know where to go from there using those navigation links at the bottom.

•  Displaying different menu styles – There are variations in the screen size of mobile devices. Using CSS, you can display different styles of the menu in difference devices. For some websites, radical alterations to the menu are required, while for others a different structure would do.

Each approach has different implications, and before you adopt any of these for your mobile website design, it is important to consider a number of factors such as the focus of the website, the nature of the menu and the requirements of the target audience.