OUGD504 - Design Development: Menu Design

Menu Design

When designing the menu bar for the website I wanted to experiment with all the different kinds of menu bars which I had seen in shopping websites. 

I initially tried experimenting with a small menu that would only cover the top left hand corner of the page when opened. These designs can be seen in the top row of figure 1 on the left hand side. The use of this as the menu bar wasn't the aesthetic which I had hoped for. I thought that the menu seemed a bit lost in the rest of the page and therefore would be harder to focus on for the user. Also when thinking about accommodating for all users I thought that this wouldn't be the best design as for users who may have worse eye sight this could be harder to read as its quite small. 

I then tried using a menu which covered one half of the page. I also experimented with the idea of the rest of the page dimming when the menu bar was clicked. This can be seen in the bottom left hand corner of figure 1. I thought that the use of dimming the rest of the page would make it easier to focus on the menu bar and not find the background images distracting. However I wasn't sure that this looked very aesthetically pleasing as it became a little messy. 

The final design which I experimented with for the menu was to do a menu that when clicked would cover the whole screen. I personally thought that this was the best design of them all because it was the most simple and there were no other distractions on the page. It would be the easiest to understand as the user would click the menu and the only options left of the page would be the ones that the menu had to offer.

Figure 1

When discussing the menu designs with the client he also though that the full screen menu was the best design. This design suited the minimalistic style which he had asked for best as it was clean and crisp.