Should a 'Profile' menu ever contain navigation links specific to the user (e.g. 'My Reports')?

Question

I’m new to the community and fairly new to UX design in general and would really appreciate some input…

I’m designing a new navigation for an eLearning platform. It’s a comprehensive site, with all sorts of reports, tools and resources.

So far, the new navigation includes two menus: a 'Profile' and a 'Main' menu.

Here’s where I’m torn! Part of me feels there would be a logic in putting anything that relates to the individual user (their reports, activity, etc.) under the Profile menu with all the other more general/non-personal resources listed under the Main menu.

However, almost every other platform (apps, websites, etc.) I’ve researched seems to keep the Profile menu as minimal as possible. I.e. perhaps no more than a settings/profile and a 'log out' option.

So my question is, does anyone know whether this is based on a particular research justification or whether it’s just become the design norm over time? And, if the latter, I guess that’s justification in itself as the users have become accustomed to finding things where they are?!

Excuse the long message! Cheers.

Answer 1

There is no universal answer to such problems, look into "information architecture", "card sorting" for solving this problem. You say that the platform has all sorts of reports, tools and resources. This is a strong indication that two items at top level is too few.
Settings/Profile as a menu item indicates rather static information to the user. You can test with (real) users to find out if they would look for "My Reports" in the profile or somewhere else.
Main is a very generic menu item. It would be better to avoid this label.