Dropdown navigation menus make sense in a lot of digital experiences. They can help users narrow down their choices as to where they want to go. In fact, Amazon and most online retailers have utilized detailed dropdown navigation to help users find what they’re seeking.

However, there are also places where dropdown menus don’t make as much sense and can, in fact, damage the user experience as well as the accessibility of the website. Consider all situations when planning your site’s UX.

User experience experts across the web have varying opinions about dropdown navigation. Some are on board, others avoid them at all costs. But the truth is, dropdown menus can work if used correctly.

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Vertical navigation supports more efficient scanning than horizontal navigation.

We know from eyetracking studies that attention leans left on websites: users look at the left half of the screen 80% of the time. The real estate on the left side of the screen is valuable, and placing your navigation there makes it likely to be noticed and scanned by your users.

Additionally, research in psycholinguistics shows that visual search in a list is more efficient if the list is vertical than if it is horizontal — people are able to find an item of interest with fewer eye fixations, simply because much more information can be derived from a single fixation. (Remember that the eye is able to perceive information not only from the exact location where it fixates but also from a relatively small area around it. As a result, even when we do read every single word in a sentence, we need to fixate only on a few of them.)