Learn the best practices for organizing mega menus and get inspired by some of the best examples in dynamic website navigation design.
For many businesses managing a vast array of content and products, mastering mega menu design is crucial for enhancing user experience and driving engagement. With the right design, they are a strategic solution to guiding users through a wide range of offerings in ways traditional menus cannot.
Keep reading to dive into the essentials of mega menus website navigation, their importance in B2B web design, and some exemplary implementations. Learning about these best mega menu examples and practices will empower you to create seamless browsing experiences that attract user engagement, whether you plan to refine or redesign your website’s navigation.
A mega menu is an expanded and enhanced version of a traditional dropdown menu that is typically triggered by a simple hover or click action.
Unlike the classic website navigation that offers limited space and options, a mega menu provides a spacious, organized layout that can accommodate a full-fledged navigation panel with categories, images, and even interactive elements.
This makes them particularly beneficial for larger sites that need to display a wide range of products, services, or information without overwhelming the user.
A mega menu excels in scenarios where a traditional menu provides restricted space and multiple sections. Here are a few use cases where they shine:
E-Commerce Websites: Showcase diverse product categories and subcategories at a glance, enhancing the shopping experience.
News and Media Sites: Organize numerous sections, making it easy for readers to find their preferred topics swiftly.
Institutions: Banks, medical centers, universities, and other organizations with a larger web presence.
Marketing Websites: B2B and B2C companies can present detailed information about your products and services. Mega menus are great for large-scale websites with lots of content.
Let’s talk about the benefits of creating a website mega menu as compared to traditional website menus.
Mega menus enhance user navigation by reducing the number of clicks needed to reach specific sections of a website. This adherence to the three-click rule ensures site visitors can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently, making the browsing experience smoother and more enjoyable.
By presenting a visually appealing and intuitive layout, mega menus significantly add to a positive user experience. They eliminate the frustration of endless scrolling or backtracking, allowing visitors to effortlessly locate their desired content. This increases the likelihood of the user engaging and converting.
With their spacious layouts, mega menus are ideal for spotlighting important content, promotions, and features all at a glance. Whether it’s a special sale, a new product launch, or key service offerings, these menus provide prime real estate to showcase vital information intuitively.
With the right design, mega menus can make the difference between a website that feels effortlessly navigable and one that feels overwhelming. Here are some best practices to ensure your mega menu design is intuitive and engaging.
🧠 Logical Categorization: Organizing menu items into logical categories makes it intuitive for users to locate any information they need. Group related items together and consider the natural flow of navigation.
🎨 Consistency with Branding: Aligning your mega menu with your branding contributes to a unified, trustworthy, and user-friendly website. Ensure that the mega menu design is consistent with your branding by adhering to your brand's color palette, fonts, and imagery.
📱 Dedicated Mobile Design: Create a design that is visually appealing and functional on smaller screens. By optimizing for mobile devices, such as collapsing menus or accordion-style interfaces, users can navigate effortlessly without sacrificing usability or design aesthetics.
You can check out some of the best mobile mega menu examples here!
🏷 Use of Labels and Icons: Include clear and concise labels for each menu item to describe its content accurately. Utilize. icons to enhance visual recognition and provide additional context, especially for international or diverse audiences.
❌ Avoid Clutter and Overloading: While mega menus can hold a lot of items, they shouldn’t be too complex and overwhelming for the user. To maintain clarity, prioritize different categories and information hierarchy. Organize content by grouping related items, using clear labels and visual cues. Before redesigning your navigation, you should create a visual diagram of your site architecture with a tool like Miro or Slickplan to make sure all essential pages are accounted for.
🕰 Design for the Long Term: You should create a design that accounts for future website growth, seamlessly allowing for new additions without overfilling or breaking the menu's UI.
🖱 Clear Hover and Click Actions: Clearly define hover and click actions to trigger the mega menu. Provide visual cues, such as color changes or subtle animations, to indicate interactive elements and ensure an intuitive website navigation experience.
Let’s dive into our list of mega menu examples from the best B2B SaaS websites that are leveraging mega menus to showcase their range of solutions and features.
First, take notes from this mega menu from Segment, a customer data platform that simplifies data collection and supports data aggregation.
Here’s how their sleek navigation bar puts the mega in menu. Hover over the navigation bar and you’ll see how Segment combines the most important sections of the nav bar: who Segment is for, product offerings, and product features. The use of gray within the menu beautifully breaks up the nav items, and eye-catching iconography neatly presents product offerings and key features.
Standout elements from Segment’s mega menu design:
Clever use of iconography and color for scanability
Hover micro-interactions that guide users as they navigate the menu
An intuitive structure with clear labeling for easy navigation
Qualtrics, a personalized experience management software, has a sleek mega menu perfectly fitting for their product and solution offerings.
A categorized mega menu like Qualtrics’s is the perfect solution if your website has many important pages. Their mega menu is enhanced with a navigation switcher that activates on hover, allowing users to search by use case seamlessly. This intuitive design choice breaks the menu up into easily navigable sections with vibrant icons and clear descriptions.
Top callouts from Qualtrics’ mega menu design:
Categorization by use case, making for an easy browsing experience
Bold iconography that creates an orderly display of their product/solution details
A compelling CTA placed at the bottom that directs users to create an account, see a product demo, or explore their XM platform
Let’s talk about Plaid, a global cloud banking platform, and why we’re fans of its FinTech website and mega menu design.
As you hover across the navigation bar, you'll notice how Plaid uniquely organizes each main category on the left side of the menu. This thoughtful arrangement allows users to find specific pages displayed on the right easily. Bonus points go to the bright color-change micro-interactions that guide users through browsing each menu option.
Notable highlights from Plaid’s mega menu design:
Minimalist aesthetic with straightforward labeling
Intuitive categorization on the left as the user locates information
Color-change micro-interactions that provide users’ visual feedback
It’s time to raise a toast to Toast, a cloud-based restaurant management software, for this next fantastic mega menu.
This mega menu design is perfect for showcasing Toast’s vast variety of product suites and services. We love how the left-hand highlighted sections of the menu make their popular solutions easily accessible. Additional visual cues ensure that users can quickly find the most sought-after content and reduce the time needed to navigate all of Toast’s offerings.
Standout elements from Toast’s mega menu design:
Highlighted sections that draw attention to key offerings
An organized structure with clear headings for each suite and restaurant type
Visual cues like highlight micro-interactions that entice users to click through each menu item upon hover
Next up is a comprehensive mega menu from Monday, a work OS software platform that helps teams manage projects and streamline workflows effortlessly.
If you’re looking for an example of an amazing nav bar UX, look no further than Monday’s mega menu. To simplify navigation, Monday's mega menu features a well-structured dropdown menu that categorizes sections by product, team, and platform. We also appreciate how each mega menu tab has multiple CTAs to guide users — from finding a featured success story to getting started with one of Monday’s templates.
Our favorite parts of Monday.com’s mega menu:
A user-friendly sub-menu that helps users locate information by product, team, and platform.
Sleek and colorful on-brand icons that guide users to relevant content.
A variety of CTAs to entice users to keep exploring Monday's featured content.
Now let’s spotlight Asana, one of today’s popular work management platforms, and their standout mega menu design.
One thing that sets Asana’s mega menu apart from others is its scrollable design. By enabling scrolling, Asana ensures that all menu items are accessible without cluttering the screen. This unique aspect enhances the user experience by allowing users to easily browse through Asana’s wide range of capabilities without feeling overwhelmed.
Amazing aspects of Asana’s mega menu design:
Clear visual hierarchy with icons and labels that guide users’ attention to important sections
A distinctive featured section on the right that emphasizes recommended content like top blog articles and new templates
A scrollable layout that allows users to seamlessly navigate through extensive options
This shortlist would not be complete without shouting out this mega menu design by Jasper, an AI-powered content generation platform.
With its eye-catching design, Jasper’s mega menu makes finding top features and content easier than ever. Hover over the resources tab and you’ll find dynamic components to access Jasper’s blog, customer stories, and reviews. In addition, Jasper’s sleek and responsive mega menu design is enhanced by polished icons and micro-interactions that make navigating efficient.
Noteworthy components from Jasper’s mega menu:
Animated components that draw users’ attention to Jasper’s blog, customer stories, and reviews
A captivating highlighted section that entices users to explore Jasper AI Copilot’s popular features
Compelling micro-interactions and contextual icons for effortless navigation
Ultimately, integrating a well-crafted mega menu into your B2B SaaS website can elevate the user experience to new heights. From the best mega menu examples, you can see how thoughtful mega menu design can make a website easier and more enjoyable to navigate. By adopting these best mega menu practices, you can update your own mega menu to ensure website visitors have a positive and productive experience every time they interact with your brand online.