The wheel, a rotating mechanism, is a pattern that appears in many devices used to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital.  They are used to cast our votes, navigate our music players, interact with our cars, and check our email. Wheels have long played an important part in our lives, from steering vehicles to volume adjustment, and designers can leverage their interactive simplicity and cross-cultural established mental models to create intuitive physical user experiences. Stepping beyond the control of one aspect of a system (e.g. volume), wheels are successfully being used for navigating and selecting elements in digital interfaces, but their value is limited to physical manifestation with little to no applicability in pure graphical form.

Examples of wheels in user interfaces

When using horizontal menus, it can be difficult to fit all menu items. One common solution is use a drop-down for the last menu item which holds all remaining (and possibly less important) menu items:

A trend towards large dropdown menus is popping up everywhere. In part due to Jakob Nielsen’s post on Mega Drop-Down Navigation.  One example is at Target.com: