Linking a sub-menu item to another main menu item

Question

I saw this in a wireframe from a team that was designing the menu of a website and saw a weird behaviour where one of the item in the drop down menu linked to the next main element in the menu.

I have not come across this behaviour before and in my opinion this is not required as the second item already has its own space in the menu. Adding the same thing to the sub menu is totally pointless. I want other opinions on this.

In the image you can see that "Item 2" exists in both the sub-menu of the first element and as the main second item in the menu.

Has anyone come across this pattern? To add to this confusion, Item 2 in the first menu is called something else but basically takes the user to the same page as the main item 2 in the menu.

Just confusing

Answer 1

It's more common than you think. The redundancy that seems useless to our eyes, in UI design pursues other purposes:

• Accessibility: the ease way for the user to find immediately what they are looking for, or without looking for it, finding more options to stay in the page
• SEO: the more data, the more action options for search engines

If there's a Who we are submenu accessing the page Our Company, there are already two elements for the search engines.

The image example is somewhat obvious with the issue but with a small modification it can come to be understood as something more real, for example when it comes to the Contact us page that can be in the Home drop-down menu and leads to the Contact page.

A clear example of redundancy in menus is the drop-down menu item repeated in the bottom menu of the page, where a better accessibility is clearly perceived as the objective:

_{Screenshot: Tablet magazine}

In any case:

Redundant navigational systems increase the likelihood that users will find what they are searching for. We often design one navigational scheme for users and another scheme for search engines.

_{Source The Benefits of Redundancy in Web Design}