Since mobile phones have become a necessity in order to remain connected with the world, the competition between the mobile companies has also increased. In order to attract maximum population, companies are trying to provide high end phones at a cheaper price. But as the price decreases, companies along with the customer have to compromise on one or the other thing. This might be anything from screen resolution and pixels to sensitivity.

Most of the phones have issues with the screen resolution and one of the challenging and common issues with mobile devices with low resolution is the navigation menus.

Some devices have space issues also, i.e. the screen size is pretty less as compared to other phones. As a result of this, elements have to be squeezed for the desired layouts which put the visibility and navigation issues in question.

Below are some resolutions to tackle such designing issues.

Reducing the space between lines
The most intuitive and simple way which requires least effort is to style the relative work while resolution is reduced. Compressing the successive lines is not very complicated.

Though this solution is preferable for those screens where menu items are less, in case of screens where menu items are more content visibility might be lost resulting in overall bad user experience.

Some of the websites like Nudge and Buffalo adopted same kind of approach to maintain simple and clean menus.

Display Blocks
Instead of using the entire screen, the screen can be divided into n number of blocks depending on the content that is to be displayed. As a result of which each menu item will be displayed as a larger block hence increasing the visibility of the content thus improving the user experience.

Likewise the same approach is suitable for screens with limited number of content because as the content increases the user will have scroll down a lot which sometimes can be really annoying for him. This is can be improved by providing a search box and thus filtering the content on the basis of search.

Also, the visibility of the content will be lost.

Listing Item in the Dropdown Menu
Listing the items in the dropdown menu or in the combo box where user can type in the item he/she is looking for and then populating the content on the basis of the searched text or displaying the content for the searched item.

Though this can be very simple and good solution but it often gives the disadvantage that options/content cannot be customized with the CSS styles. Hence, customization will be limited to device operation support and provide a poor user experience.

Though the display of the content page itself at first sight will save lots of space and hence further development can be relatively easy and straight forward.

Menu Icons
Using a menu icon on the page is a very good alternative as applying styles over it is relatively easy and moreover space taken up a small menu icon is very less hence providing a greater control over the screen to both user and developer.

Menu Icons can be seen in any mobile application/webpage. Menu Icon webpages into various screens and blocks and allows user to understand the flow of the webpage/Application.

Toggle Menu
In Toggle Menu, the user toggles through menu items by clicking them which pushes the content on the screen. In order to make toggle menus elegant and simple, it is recommended to provide toggle menus with side down effect.

Other than the above mentioned points, there are various responsive layouts available and it is basically a developer’s choice to choose the one that’s most appropriate; the one that will enhance the features of the screen and improve the user experience.