Multiple Navigations - messy or necessary?

Question

I'm looking at UEFA's website and seeing they have 3 navigations menus.

Is there any support for this being a good UX? The organization does alot, and structuring their site this way might make sense, I'm just trying to see the argument for so many navigations.

Is there a better way to structure this for easier navigation?

Answer 1

I agree it is visually cluttered and hard to know what is what at first glance. It's also very intense in colors making it even worse from a UX perspective. So what do you do? I'd suggest a mega drop-down menu which is visually hidden at first, but on hover (or click on touch devices) you get a simpler menu to work with.

Take a look at this image and see if it would work on UEFA web site:

Answer 2

To me it looks like the design is heavily dependent on their vendor's limitations. It seems like there's 10+ sites that were developed independently of each other and were combined as an after thought.

As awful as that top menu looks—it's the only consistent element across all of the pages.

The ability to collapse the top menu is a also a plus, but I think they could combine a few of the leagues using hover drop-downs as Benny pointed out. Their mobile site already makes use of a dropdown navigation menu...

Answer 3

In order to create an efficient navigation menu, there's some primary considerations to be made:

1. Understanding what the user is trying to acquire by visiting your page
2. What definitive business objectives you have (or functionality you'd like to expose)
3. How the context changes - an example of this, in eCommerce, would be changing your navigation near a new product release to allow fast access to the information
4. What patterns the user has developed during the course of using your website - that is, Amazon's design may be very cluttered and busy from a navigation standpoint, but users have adapted to it and now know how to use it to find what they need.

The tendency with content-based websites is to expose as much of the content they're creating, assuming that almost every piece should be seen - and why not? If it isn't worth seeing, it shouldn't be there. The issue is that sometimes, in the exposure of a wide range of content, things such as navigation menus become too nested, complicated, unnecessary, and downright frustrating.

UEFA seems to neglect some of the things I've mentioned. Without having access to their analytics or user testing, I'd immediately say that the navigation should be simplified by removing as many non-critical (and even duplicate) menu entries as possible. For example, News and Video is displayed twice in the screenshot - that really isn't necessary. The other concern, from a visual standpoint, is that the top-most menu (and it's submenu expander it appears) could be easily glossed over and ignored.

The entire header, while being functional and probably serving it's users, could benefit greatly from taking a look at the four points I mentioned. That, to me, would result in a two tier (at max - the current is a minimum of three tiers with breadcrumbs) navigation menu that mixes user needs and business objectives. It should be evaluated with data support and adjusted at least quarterly to reflect new trends and evolving objectives.