Mobile electronic products have recently become very popular because of their portable convenience and versatile functions. The personal digital assistant (PDA) can even access the Internet. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement in the PDA interface. This research proposes a systematic approach to analyze, generate and evaluate a PDA integrated menu–icon interface design for the DigitHub Company based on customer requirements. Hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) is incorporated with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to identify and categorize functional PDA menus and their corresponding icons. We evaluate the importance of each of the different functional menus and categories. We generate five PDA menu–icon interface design alternatives that meet the proposed design guidelines, and we evaluate each for their respective feasibilities. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is applied to measure the overall operating performance of the five PDA menu–icon interface design alternatives. The evaluation results show that the preferred design is option PDA5, a hierarchical and separated menu–icon layout style that features a two-layer menu structure. We expect that the proposed development procedure for the generation and evaluation of PDA menu–icon design alternatives based on customer requirements will be of interest to interface designers who wish to focus on mobile products. Relevance to industry This paper proposes an integrated procedure for designing PDA menu–icon interfaces. Our methodology should help in the creation and optimization of screen layouts for mobile phones, global positioning system (GPS) navigation devices, digital cameras and related screen interfaces.