Menu bars have traditionally been thought of as the right location to place all otherwise absent feature access in an application. With a long list of items in a growing number of menu headings, an application menu can quickly become hard to navigate. This is generally considered to be due to the number of items that an average human can hold in their short-term memory. Experiments by George Miller in 1956 suggested that the number of objects that can typically be held in working memory is between five and nine (seven plus or minus two—Miller's "Magical Number"). More recent estimates have shown that this number is typically lower, closer to just four or five items.

Taking this into consideration, we can understand why it's important to keep menus fewer and shorter—at every step of navigating, there should be no more than nine options available—and far less, if possible.

The presentation of a menu varies from one platform to another with the standard top of the window or top of the screen being most common on the desktop, and an icon at the top-left of the screen (known as the hamburger) most prevalent on mobile layouts. What you'll notice, regardless of the layout, is that the top-level list will be around five items and, if further options are required, the menus that cascade down won't be much longer than that. If you find your menus becoming overwhelmingly long, perhaps consider task-specific toolbars or other grouping of context-relevant shortcuts, possibly opened from a single menu item.

Whatever design you choose for making features available, please remember the user's main focus or the current context.

You don't want to end up overwhelming them to the point that there's significant thinking required at every step of the way: