Cisco.com launches drop down mega menus & fat footers

Click on this graph to see a lightbox of all best practices

Innovative twists on an emerging trend

Cisco.com launched its new mega menu and fat footer designs this morning.

Its entry into these design arenas pushes both approaches well past the innovation point and on the way to becoming a competitive requirement. In other words, if mega and fat aren’t on your plan for next year, it’s time to get them on the list.

Of the two, fat footers are the closest to a tipping point, and are a great place to put all of those “must have but no room” links that stakeholders clamber to have on the home page. Mega menu adoption rates are slightly behind, but heading for a tipping point over the next 12 months. They are powerful navigation and marketing real estate for the companies that know how to use them.

But back to Cisco, which provides some interesting variations on emerging themes. Important assets that were once hidden inside the site are now front and center. Direct links to Cisco.com’s stores. Fast paths to find a partner. Cisco’s primary product categories, industry focus and the ability to browse by company size.

But the really brilliant behaviors can be seen in the products & services and support mega menus. Rather than throw out a blizzard of well-organized links, Cisco.com’s new products & services mega menu contextualizes Cisco’s massive product portfolio by target market – with some nice interactive behaviors thrown into the mix. The support mega menu allows users to search for product support right from the home page – and brings previously invisible support zones (SMB and Linksys) directly into the visitor’s view.

Although not Web 3.0 per se (although Cisco.com is a leader here), these mega menu designs are part of a couple of important design trends.

First and foremost, they flatten a Website by allowing visitors to bypass (often dysfunctional) landing pages and drill directly into the site. In essence, it creates a Website that is perceivably flatter and less cumbersome for visitors to drive and use. As important, these techniques free up valuable home page real estate so companies can promote and market their wares. In Cisco.com’s case, it has also used some of this real estate to create an elegant home for those gnarly news feeds and important social media connections.

So what’s missing from Cisco.com’s new mega and fat design? From a home page perspective, not much. Inside the site, however, is a different story. In a perfect world, these savvy navigation capabilities would be persistent across the Cisco.com site (see Juniper.net and Novell.com for examples). Once Cisco.com achieves this objective, it will have some of the best global navigation behaviors across the sites we watch.

Tags: best practice, cisco.com, Design, launch, Navigation, Usability, website design