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I'm a user of a popular website that uses horizontal menus for navigation. As the site's functionality grows, the number of menu items also grow. As the horizontal space is limited, the design choice seems to be to add more levels to the navigation.
I've warned against this. Could you help me create a solid argument to improve the design?
This is a problem I thought about a lot for our site as we have a lot of content categories. A flat horizontal menu wouldn't come close to working and even drop down menus with multiple sub-levels would probably start getting overwhelmed.
In the end, I settled on a cross between a mega-menu and a tab interface. At present, including the parent categories, we have over 40 linked items in our menu and it could be comfortably doubled or perhaps even tripled by adjusting the height of the menu, the whitespace, and the font size.
Rather than going with a traditional horizontal or even a dropdown, I'd recommend you take a long look at mega-menus. You'll be able to keep some semblance of a horizontal menu, but with tremendous upside and the ability to scale. The mega-menu pattern is even endorsed by Jakob Neilsen as a result of some extensive testing. (He has some great tips in that article for doing it right, too.)
Here are a few mega-menu inspiration articles that should give you a good idea of different ways you can implement this pattern:
And some ways you can implement it:
It's risky if you don't know by how much the site will scale following development. If you have a very clear indication of the IA and can be assured it won't develop that much then the risks are minimised. But, and speaking from personal experience, this approach can get very messy once you begin to introduce more levels than the design legislated for, moreover, long link names minimise the number of elements you can include in the navigation.
summary: use if IA is limited and clearly defined. do not use if many sub sections or growth of website is expected.
Um... How do you know what you've been ignored? By the fact they didn't immediately redesign their website following your email? :). Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that, especially since you say that it's a popular website (which usually implies that it's big, meaning that a redesign involves a huge amount of money, politics and work).
Horizontal menus don't scale very well in terms of top-level items, but they can incorporate up to two levels of submenus relatively easily. Vertical menus can easily be wider (more top-level items), but they don't scale well in terms of depth, and two levels might feel too much.
This depends on the specific site, but adding a navigation level is in itself a valid solution, and it doesn't automatically mean that it's not as good as adding a top-level menu item.
That is actually one of the problems with vertical menus. Since they scale so well, the owners are often tempted to keep on adding items, ruining the menu, instead of changing the structure and improving the IA by adding a level.
