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10 Best Practices for Designing Drop-Down Menu

Saadia Minhas
UX Planet
Published in
8 min readAug 26, 2024

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

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Published in UX Planet

UX Planet is a one-stop resource for everything related to user experience.

Written by Saadia Minhas

UX Design Passionate | Love to share and learn about UX design | https://uxdworld.com/

Responses (16)

What are your thoughts?

Hi, I think that the X and check are inverted on the the solution for providing 2 options for selection picture, the recommended solution: radio button has a red X while the option menu for 2 option has the green checkmark.
Have a good day

Tldr: Don't be like Microsoft 😂

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for your contribution.