Because your site is an intranet, you may be able to achieve that ‘up front and centre’ feeling by automatically personalizing the site when the user logs in. Examples are portal sites, Windows 8 Start screen, Facebook, etc. In addition, do some research on your users and the type of users they are. If you work for a social media company or a I.T. company, best bet is they would be able to easily navigate a Mega Menu or enjoy some times of social connection/personalization. If you are working for a hospital and creating their intranet, you’d probably have many people with a wide variety of skills and computer litaercy that you would be forced to create simple navigation and strive to create something for the lowest common denominator of user.

I remember a while back that Google wanted to get rid of their ‘ugly black bar’ and when they implemented a version of their own Mega Menu (remember when you had to roll over the logo, and then all of their sub sites would populate, like Gmail, Shopping, Maps, Etc…) they had huge backlash from the community. One of the biggest issues they had was simple: it required users to think.

Every positive statement i have read on mega menu’s requires some amount of thinking. But right there is the problem, thinking. As Steve Krug wrote “Don’t Make Me Think,” we are all reminded that thinking and the web just don’t mix well together.

Thanks for your comments. Agreed that any UX pattern can be applied well or poorly. As I’ve stated before I simply think mega menus have a very niche function and, for good or for bad, are generally not well implemented.

I really like your question though. Because there is a gray area between a regular menu and a mega menu. In fact, I think some mega menus are the product of regular menu scope creep – hence the problem. One of the issues I often find is that very few people want to test two different menus side by side, because it touches navigation and information architecture.

I agree with the thoughts on telling a story. Removing the editorial story from your site is not a good idea;however, some sites like amazon do not require a story. In Amazon’s case, I just want to get to an item or category quickly. The context must be considered.

A mega menu can still drive to important sub-areas that are the beginnings of stories. Often a forced middle point is not necessary. That said, content strategy should be considered before allowing users to leap past critical content.

One thing that hasn’t been talked about much is when is the menu “mega?” Where is the line between a small multi-column menu and a “mega” menu? Does user reaction differ between them?

Yes, the contextual relevance issue is big from an SEO perspective. At a minimum the mega menu should only appear for the silo in which you’re currently navigating. Unfortunately, I rarely see this being done, often because someone will posit that a user will want to, say, get from ladies blouses to shotgun ammo.

I find that, in practice, mega menus are often the comfortable fallback for arguments and a ‘lets try to please all the people all of the time’ type of mentality.

You’re right, the G+ add to circles interface suffers from the ‘wacka mole’ problem. Very frustrating.

Yes, it might support that use case if I go directly to a site and then want to look at a specific category. I think the problem is that you can’t feature all the categories so you have to be selective.

Your example is actually a really good one because I don’t think bathroom fittings should be in a mega menu. There would be way too many other categories (bigger, more important ones) that would take priority. So that’s where a click to the bathroom page would allow a full page presentation to provide context and direction. Otherwise you’d have a laundry list of categories under Bathroom in a mega menu that might prove difficult to locate.

The flip side was that the UX people felt that it helped users navigate the site. I think we could have found a happy medium that served both of our needs.