How can I customize a menu to be intuitive for my users: show user name, have dropdown items
This can be easily done with the available following contributed modules.


Create menus from Admin UI, and restrict the visibility by Menu Per Role module. Here, you might like to to show the menus Create Account and Sign In only to anonymous (not logged in) users.
You can use the Menu Token module, if you wish to show username as menu. You'll need to install the Token module and the Ctools module in order to do this. This can be done in following way:


Create a menu link in your User menu using Admin UI by visiting http://yoursite.url/admin/structure/menu/manage/user-menu.

In the link title you input the user name. The following will replace the [current-user:name] with the username of the logged in user. You can even use other fields, under the "Menu Token Options" > "Replacement Patterns".

The output of the above:

As admin:

As an authenticated user:


For the dropdown feature of the menu, you can use the DHTML Menu or the Superfish menu.


Hope that helps. Please feel free to ask questions.