Expanding menu trees
This method is the closest to what users experience when they see a folder tree of their files (and programmes) on their computer. Often there is a symbol or character by a folder (or sub-menu) to indicate this level can be opened out to display more choices in that level. You can see this on Windows by using Windows Explorer or opening 'My Computer' and seeing the folder tree of the disk drives and folders on the left, (on some versions you have to press the 'Folders' button to view this).
The most common methods of showing the level (or sub-menu) states are using a character or symbol to the left of the menu level name -
| Menu State | Character | Symbol |
| Closed | + |  |
| Open | - |  |
You can see this in action on this site's menu on the left.
As before the text method is more scaleable to different screen resolutions as it matches the text size.