Give Every Menu Row One Job
If one row can do two different things depending on where you tap, people will hit the wrong one. Give each row a single job.
- Citing NN/g research, Smashing’s Vitaly Friedman writes that with no icon at all, users expect tapping a menu item to open a new page.
- In that study, participants tapped the text label and the icon about equally, except with a caret, where they tapped the icon more.
- Friedman advises against split buttons, where the label opens a page but the icon opens the accordion, and says letting a tap on the category open the menu is more reliable.
- His rule of thumb is to underline links and use a caret for anything that expands.
Vitaly Friedman published this on Smashing Magazine on 23 October 2026, summarising Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) research on accordion icons. The tap findings are NN/g’s as reported by Smashing; this brief relies on that summary, not the raw study data.
Phone menus, FAQs, settings screens and filters all hide content behind rows that expand. When the label goes to one place and the icon does something else, people land on the wrong page or think the menu is broken, and that rarely shows up clearly in analytics.
Open your product on a phone and list every row that expands or collapses. Tap the label, then the icon. Where they do different things, make the whole row open the section and put an Overview link inside it. Use a caret for rows that expand and plain underlined text for links.
Put it to work 20 minutes
A tap audit of one menu or FAQ with a fix for every split row
Write a one-page tap audit of one menu or FAQ: each expandable row, what tapping the label does, what tapping the icon does, which icon it uses, and the fix for any row where label and icon disagree.
See a worked example
Use one menu your product already has, such as the phone navigation, an FAQ or a filter panel. Test it on a real phone, not a desktop browser.
- Expandable rows
- Pricing / chevron, Help / plus sign
- Label versus icon
- Pricing label opens the pricing page; the chevron opens the sub-menu.
- Fix
- Whole row opens the sub-menu, with an Overview link to the pricing page inside.
Your turn
List each row that opens or closes.
Write what a label tap and an icon tap each do.
Say how the row will do one thing.
Your draft stays in this browser. No account needed.
Icon conventions are habits, not laws. If your users already know your menus well, or your design system uses plus and minus signs consistently, switching may cause more confusion than it removes. Friedman says plus and minus typically work well too.
Facts were checked against Smashing’s article. The research is NN/g’s and is reported second-hand here, so test any change with a few real users on your own menus.
After the change, do people open the section they wanted on their first tap?
Watch: Menu taps followed straight away by a back navigation · Support messages or session replays showing people stuck in the menu · Whether five test users open the right section on their first tap