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A Perplexing Trend: Visually Complicated Menus
I have been noticing that menus of all kinds–from websites to restaurants–have become more complicated and thus more and more difficult to navigate. The trend toward clean and simple seems to be reversing. Now, I would say most of the time when I go to a website, I am overwhelmed with visual tiles on the landing page, plus information revealed only to the enthusiastic scroller, menus layered under other menus, and pages that do not deliver as promised. It can take several minutes of clicking around to figure out what to do next.
This now widespread tendency to present the customer with confusing arrays of choices, and make it difficult to complete such simple actions as viewing a product sample, makes me wonder whether sprawling menus are not some kind of marketing strategy that increases sales. Non-profits are guilty of it–note the inscrutable internal workings of the College Board site–but most private companies are doing it, too. Just the other day my index finger got a big workout with the mouse merely trying to locate a demo for a tech product that the company was presumably wanting to sell to interested schools. Also, our school’s online portfolio and PD credits system is not really something one could teach to a colleague. You simply make selections and click the mouse, because neither logic nor intuition helps with the opaque setup. You just keep boldly advancing, and somehow the work gets done.
Also, SurveyMonkey used to be so clean and navigable when we first signed up for it. Now that the subscription price has increased, the service is becoming turgid. There are multiple landing pages that don’t seem to offer me anything new or helpful. It doesn’t seem as if the function buttons parallel one another from one page to the next. The site designers are starting to fold up one of the toolbars on the left, leaving you to decipher their runes to locate the item you need. I can still use the program, despite my annoyance with the designers’ compulsion to fiddle with it, because I’ve been a customer for so long. But I received a highly agitated phone call from my sister one day, who had signed up to create a simple survey, couldn’t figure out how to change the question type, and as a result kept re-entering the question. At that point, she would have been happier collecting her data via snail mail.
Even fast-food restaurants have become infected with the need to set up confusing menus. Lately at Subway, I can’t find the deal of the month on the 12-inch sandwich anymore. Availability and pricing are divided up into meaningless categories like “signature” and “classics.” If you study the panoply of boards enough, you might light upon the information you are seeking. Frugal tendencies may provide you with motivation enough to stand there scanning, for little reward.
I went to our town’s new Panera Bread, with lovely loaves arranged in a display window, and studied the menu in vain for mention of “bread.” I had to ask to find out that indeed, the soup was served with a bit of french baguette on the side. When I asked about the sandwich choices at Starbucks, which were fuzzy in ways I couldn’t put my finger on, the cashier explained that they had a tomato-mozzarella item that might not have been listed. Now that’s a head-scratcher. Why wouldn’t it be on the menu? To head off some local tomato shortage? Because the basil wasn’t fair trade?
Even at Wendy’s, I have a hard time locating the bargain items on the dense display. (Hint: they are grouped under the 4 for 4 dollars section.) A local Asian restaurant seems to switch cooks and offerings, enough so that instead of changing the main menu board, new menus are simply hung in available space at the front. I can think of five sources of ordering information in that establishment, including a page handwritten on yellow notebook paper. The menu slog is worth it, though, since the Thai food there is delicious.
Has anyone else noticed the trend toward complicated menus? Any thoughts as to why businesses are favoring this approach?
Published in Technology
On websites, I think the trend is phone-first layout, which means things are dumbed down. Did you miss the dot in the corner? That is the menu with the hidden services you are looking for.
I agree with fast-food restaurant menus. I go to Taco Bell once a year and everything has a new name each time. They only serve permutations on the same 7 ingredients, why do they have to make it so hard to find a taco?
The good news is that somebody is piloting a new AI order taking system for fast food. Rather than battle some super-complicated kiosk, we will once again be able to say “cheeseburger, fries, and a coke, please.”. Simple things should not be hard.
McDonald’s has gone to a fancy graphics display inside their stores. Prices now scroll between small, medium, and large, so you gotta sit and stare at one spot to get the right one.
I blame ’em for selling salads. That, and endless demand for novelty implies the menu has to be endlessly updated.
Your examples of what is happening on websites revolve around established agencies and businesses. What you are complaining about is very obvious and true, whenever a person needs to deal with any of the Mega Sites. I rather expect a new cause of death to come about: “head explosion” which ailment will take out those of us who are web challenged to begin with, and easily frustrated by this new web complexity
On the other hand, start ups are now using SquareSpace, which makes websites very clean and simple in design. (Square Space supposedly makes it easy for anyone to create a website for their business, so it has to be simple.) If a web surfer finds the site with the new desired product or service, they can easily order it, as the website is all very clean, clear, and simple.
Then if and when the new company vaults into success, the company’s owner is told that they must spend X amount “upgrading” and improving their website. They hire experts and the experts want a paycheck so they are very unlikely to say to their boss, “Well, you only need to do a few minor tweaks to make things better for you.” Instead the website experts jazzify the website in a complex and inscrutable way, to justify the man hours they claim are needed for improving the website. As long as this is the trend, we web users are screwed.
That’s true! The McDonald’s menu keeps changing before your eyes. If you missed it the first time, you keep looking so you can catch the info on its next go-round.
That explanation makes sense.
It’s been happening slowly for a long time, about thirty years. The reasons are more complicated, less intentional.
One of the steps in building a website is designing the user interface. It requires a technical skill that is now called “user experience engineering.” It used to be called “external design”.
Every five years, noticeably more user apps are designed with noticeably reduced levels of engineering skill in this technical area.
The folks who produce the interfaces are unaware of how badly they are doing this, and unaware that they are making things worse and worse.
The reasons? It’s complicated.
With my own Websites, everything is simple. At this point I only maintain one that is not mine, and that is for my church. We went through a recent redesign, mainly due to one of the board members insisting it looked like a site for “old people.” (Her daughter told her so, since she was no spring chicken.) I managed to make it so nothing is moving, anyway. But they, especially this one board member, insisted on more graphics. So, now we do have a limited tile menu, but we also have the fat footer at the bottom with the full menu. At least I kept them from anything that moved on the screen.
Yes, I know how to do all those things. Just because we can does not mean we should.
“Do you think you can get your excel macro to send an email?”
“I’m certain it’s possible, however I intend to never learn how”
That way madness lies.
The fun part is that we actually now have fewer graphics. They’re just all crammed onto the first page.
Probably so they can have something ‘new’ to advertise.
Bath and Body Works is notorious for mystifying product-line changes in-store, and an annoying website experience…Sheesh!
That’s a great explanation. So I am wondering – are the apps a concern because they need to be included, like there is probably an app so the users can like the website on FB, twitter, instagram et al.
Or are the developers using apps to make the designs? Or is it both?
I have no marketing degree or experience, but it occurs to me that if they can get customers to spend longer on their sites, that time might correlate to the kinds of sales and mind penetration a company gets from commercials. We hate commercials on the internet, but we like pretty pictures and powerful fonts.
Perhaps too, the showing of partial information – this picture, that new product name/font – might have synergy with a larger campaign; confusion over a MacHuh? on a website could resolve into a MacAhah! when the Lab Millennial sees a billboard later that day.
Probably I am reading too much into it, but where advertising is concerned there is so much money spent that it is hard to imagine much happens without a research-backed reason.*
_______________________
*Except for Gillette; that was nuts.
Part of it is they’re only learning apps or templates or things like that, and not learning design principles and what goes on behind their magic software. I code in HTML using Notepad. (Or I have the HTML generated out of a database that I also coded.) I create my graphics very carefully. I know exactly what is happening and exactly how big it is. People using “intelligent” software to create and maintain Websites often don’t know what is going on behind the scenes and often create bloated Websites. But also, they never see it through anything other than their phones.
I think I’d better go eat before I curmudge all over the place.
To my Luddite mind, most of these complications come from companies hiring computer geeks to design the site. In order for these geeks to keep busy and become ever-more valuable to their employer, they must constantly revise and update their work. Unfortunately for the customer, this means the site become increasingly difficult for the non-expert (in that particular site’s operation) to navigate.
End of rant.
Jim, this is a part of it. The modern classification “computer geeks” comprises people who are assumed to have all of the skills needed to make a good applications, including dynamic websites like e-commerce sites.
They’ve been regarded as “computer experts” by the current generation of non-technical folks from the time they were little: they played videogames! They can’t analyze process nor data requirements, they can’t do conceptual process or data design, they can’t write documentation.
These folks do not have the minimum skill set. They are like the workers of a bakery. All of them know how to put icing on a cake, but none of them know how to bake.
Ain’t that the truth!
I avoid all this. I go to Pizza Hut, they know me and ask if I want my usual? I say yes and pretty soon it comes to me. Or Applebees, and get the grilled chicken. I just order it, don’t bother looking for it on the menu. I don’t venture with foods as I am allergic to soy, msg, and sulfites.
My daughter worked at a Friendly’s ice cream restaurant when she was in high school. As luck would have it, she started working there the year they introduced frozen yogurt and the 55 toppings and stir-ins that went with it.
I used to wait for her outside in the car so I could bring her home, and so I got a good view of the ice cream and yogurt patrons. Wow, what a disaster this menu change meant in the real world of the line of customers waiting for their ice cream. The lines would back up ridiculously as families would approach the takeout window and stare at all their options and ask questions and then change their mind. I would think to myself, “This is so typical of management to have absolutely no idea what is actually happening in real life in the actual ice cream shops. Clearly, no one has bothered to talk to the people actually working with this exciting new menu!”
Twenty years later, it seems to have gotten worse rather than better for fast-food workers. I suspect the present situation is preparation for an AI takeover of the fast-food restaurant business. I can see the appeal to both the businesses and customers. I have to admit I like working with the Domino’s Pizza website where I can invent my own pizza combinations. I like working on my computer where no one is in line behind me or waiting to take my order at the counter.
At the moment, there are all kinds of learning curve issues for consumers juggling their wallets and smartphone apps. But five years from now, it will be second nature to us. We’ll study the menu at home or in our offices or in the parking lot, we’ll submit our selections to the restaurant computers, and the restaurant’s robots will put our meal together so when we pull up to the drive-up window at the moment we specified we’d be there, a robot will hand us a bag and we’ll be happily on our way.
More often than not, I order from Amazon. They already have may payment information, and it’s simple.
Of course they have a complicated web site, but I bypass all that by using their search
I rarely order food online, including restaurant food. I make an exception with pizza orders that I’m either getting delivered or picking up.
Because I eat breakfast at McDonald’s a lot (I pick up the food at the drive-in window) I did download their app. It turned out the local McDonald’s there don’t allow me to order breakfast off that app (they list their outlets as closed during breakfast time) I ended up not using it.
If you want to bypass complicated menus (food or non-food) use search. If the web site’s local search doesn’t work, you can use Google’s advanced search and specify the web site. You’ll usually find what you want, if you know what you want.
Just go to In-N-Out instead.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/In-N-Out-Heiress-Is-Young-American-Female-Billionaire-189897601.html
Of course, they are happy to serve you several off menu variants, explained in their Not So Secret Menu.
I wish we had them…
Likewise.
I’ll say that the not-so-secret menu is also an excellent bit of interface design; if you’re the kind of guy who’s invested enough in the choice to go digging through menus you’ll look it up. If you’re just looking for a burger you don’t have to see it.
Yes.
You’ll need to take a number and get in line.
My own experience, while it does not encompass “supersized” websites, does include a fair bit of work with software vendors and application developers to get the user interface right. My background is the “user” side, and I’ve had some training in design principles, and although I’m not super-geeky, I generally understand enough to be an adequate liaison between the user community and the tecchies.
In addition, I’ve built several websites, on WordPress and some other platforms. Again, small beer, but functional, efficient and easy to use and maintain (“ease of use” and “ease of maintenance” are not the same thing, BTW).
In my experience, what users consider poor website design is generally a result of either or both of the following: 1) Folks on the back end (technical) either having no communication with, poor communication with, or not paying attention to, the user community or user advocacy group. Those who don’t use the website on a regular basis, the way users do, are simply not the best people to be deciding how things work, and what happens when you click on this button or that one. Technical skills, and programming expertise are a marvelous thing, and not something I excel at on a very high level. But I know user interfaces and how to make a site easy to use. Or, 2) A programmer or web designer who is infatuated with his or her own abilities, who wants to show them off, and whose ego won’t tolerate the removal of clever bells and whistles, no matter how mysterious or useless they are to the people who use the site on a regular basis (underlying this, of course, is a communications problem again.)
The ubiquity of “cloud computing,” of everything being everywhere, and of the assumption on most web developers’ parts that everyone has unlimited computer resources that can handle any sort of inefficient bloatware thrown at it, certainly doesn’t help with the production of clean and nifty websites either.
Decades ago, this website was something I checked on a regular basis, and from which I learned a lot, from the guy who coined the phrase “mystery meat navigation” (which some of you have described, without calling it that, above). The website’s no longer active. But “learning good web design by looking at bad web design” is a pretty good method. No technical experience needed. Poor web design is somewhat similar to Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity, “we recognize it when we go to use it.” No technical expertise required for that.
Is a major problem in the business. Can be mitigated by adult supervision.
I’m sure that fairy dust helps too. Let me know when you find some.
Ah, yes. I see what You did there. Yer referring to Ricochet 2.0.
Perhaps.
Of a very complex problem, you’ve identified a remarkable number of constituents in a short post.
Well, thank you (I think?). More years than I care to mention, and more trips around the block than I can count, is all.