10 Best Practices for Designing Drop-Down Menu

A drop-down menu is a standard UI control that provides a clean and intuitive way to present a list of options to users.

However, they can be confusing for users if not designed properly. This article will discuss a few best practices that help you create drop-down menus to enhance your product’s usability.

Learn how to design an interactive Drop-down menu animation in Figma:

Drop-down Menu Design Guidelines and Best Practices

1. Don’t use long menus
2. Don’t use a drop-down for 2 options
3. Disable options that are not valid at the moment
4. Don’t use a drop-down where options are too obvious
5. Don’t use a drop-down for more than 2 levels
6. Make a clear visual design
7. Consider mobile devices
8. Organize options in a logical order
9. Provide a search feature
10. Make a default selection

1. Don’t use long menus

Using drop-down menus with too many options often leads to poor user experience.

• It increases the cognitive load for users to process and compare a long list of options. Users will spend more time on a simple selection.
• Users will be required to scroll the list to see all the options. This can be more annoying on small screens.
• It takes more loading time to load all the options quickly when the user scrolls through the list to find the required option.

Figma: An example of a long menu

What if you need a long drop-down menu?

In such cases, certain best practices help you manage long drop-down menus.