Guidelines for menu items

• The menu should have a short meaningful headline, preferably centered, in upper/lower case; unneccessary emphasis/embellishment should be avoided.
• Menus should show
• the menu items that can be selected
• the menu items that currently cannot be selected (deemphasized)
• the menu items that have already been selected
• the presence of submenus
• if applicable: the shortcut that can be used to select the item (as an alternative to selecting it with the mouse)
• if applicable: short and polite instructions on how to select items, formulated in terms of the user's task.
• Entries should be in upper/lower case; avoid unneccessary emphasis/embellishment.
• The difference of each entry to all other entries must be very clear (Schwartz & Norman, 1986).
• If the name of an item consists of more than one word, the most significant word should come first.
• If letter codes are being used, the code should correspond to the first letter of the first word. If this is not possible, numeric codes should be used (Pellman, 1984) .
• To achieve external consistency with earlier versions or competitive products, menu items should be lexically identical (least there won't be a transfer effect; Foltz et al., 1988). Addition and ommission of menu entries is o.k.
• The error rate for items with text and icons combined is 50% less than for mere textual items (Muter and Mayson, 1986).

Example of menu design: