Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html

by henning • 17 years ago

115 54 17 years ago

useit.com

mixmax• 17 years ago

"Also as always, the more faddish features such as tag clouds exhibit major usability problems. "

This is worth taking note of. Particularly if your users aren't very web-savvy.

unalone7• 17 years ago

Who decided a tag cloud was a good idea? Who used tag clouds enough to decide to put it on their web site? A tag cloud is one of those Internet Things where seeing it on a web site makes me lose some respect for the site maker.

noodle• 17 years ago

i feel like they have a reasonable use, especially for internal development, search and such. but trying to push them as a primary method for navigating your page is pretty stupid.

ken2• 17 years ago

I think tag clouds are a fantastic idea. They just happen to be terrible for navigation. I don't know why anybody thinks that's their primary purpose.

If I go to a page, one glance at the tag cloud shows me what the author writes about most. I can't think of a smaller/simpler/quicker way.

The fact that they're clickable is basically irrelevant.

henning2• 17 years ago

It's just one more pointless feature to ignore, like a row of "submit this page to some other random website" buttons, a column of video comments from some random video startup (Seesmic?), ads for Wordpress themes, and other typical Web 2.0 detritus.

unalone7• 17 years ago

I'd like to think the problem stems from the fact that a lot of Web 2.0 startup startupers are extremely young and think that a Digg button, a bunch of startup plugins, and a column of AJAX goodies will add to a page's design rather than compromise it. Unfortunately, these things are so widespread that I fear some people have bought into these things as actual effective tools, which saddens me somewhat.

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

Um, I realize that the audience here is mostly university students, but do we really need frat house language in our submission titles now?

I'm not really offended, but would you say that you "had a chubby" for a new feature around the boardroom table, with women present? It would be nice if we could keep this site a little more esteemed than the sad excuse for language found on most of the internet.

EDIT (Obviously, the editors have changed the title.)

axod• 17 years ago

Not to mention the fact 'chubby' doesn't mean anything like that in the UK, or I suspect other places, so the reader has to guess what it might mean.

petercooper3• 17 years ago

What the heck has slang got to do with gender in this case? I'd use slang like that around women or men, but probably not in the board room, no. Women aren't all delicate flowers you have to tip-toe around, y'know.

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

I think most men know that there are phrases that can be said in a locker room that wouldn't endear you to the average women, but that doesn't really reflect on women at all.

There are certainly always exceptions, but unless you're a fairly tame guy or friends with fairly non-typical women, locker-room talk usually won't go over well.

My comment wasn't in anyway meant to be demeaning to women.

cracki• 17 years ago

was the submission title changed after you wrote that, or do I miss something?

biohacker42• 17 years ago

Yes it was changed, and I thank the mods who changed it, we don't need to stoop to the level of snickering 12 year olds.

henning2• 17 years ago

Fine, I'll take my submissions elsewhere. I've had about enough of the Revenge of the Nerds wannabe-entrepreneur android attitudes around here.

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

You'd be amazed at how far being polite can get you in life in general, let alone business.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Best Buy has been using these for years:

http://www.bestbuy.ca/home.asp

Mouse over the nav bar to see it in action. Oddly, only the Canadian version of the site seems to use them.

Hexstream3• 17 years ago

It fails for me (Firefox on Ubuntu 8.04). The menu appears under the flash embed.

bobbyi• 17 years ago

Linux Firefox in general has problems with always wanting to put flash on the top of the z ordering.

Mistone• 17 years ago

i appreciate the reserved nature of his endorsement for this nav feature, def lets me know its not the tip of the week style recommendation, but more like, "hey this really works"

unalone7• 17 years ago

I used to really dislike Nielsen, but after a few years of reading him I've come to realize just how much of a consummate professional he is. I disagree with him on occasion in regards to aesthetic design, but when it comes to usability he is very rarely biased and most everything he writes is helpful.

davidmabe• 17 years ago

Anyone know a jquery plugin that implements these type of drop downs?

unalone7• 17 years ago

You could probably implement this entirely in CSS. It's a one-layer menu, so using display:none combined with a hover element could hide and show the stuff.

The problem is figuring out just what you're going to put into that menu. Nielsen's point is that these aren't single-list menus: they're complex and serve multiple purposes at once. So figure out what your menu's going to do before you do anything.

Nogwater• 17 years ago

Could you add the 0.5 sec. delay and cover the diagonal issue with just CSS?

bprater• 17 years ago

Would it need to be absolutely positioned on the page? If so, how do you front-end guys handle this cross-platform?

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

You'd have issues with our favourite browser trying to do it in CSS exclusively. I'd go for javascript for the next few years at least.

dminor• 17 years ago

I couldn't find one when I implemented drop downs a few months ago, but the hover intent plugin was very useful for rolling my own.

AlfaWolph• 17 years ago

Sorry to stray from the topic of the article, but what exactly, is a "chubby" supposed to be? I guess I'm getting older and not as down with the kidspeak as I used to be..

pchivers• 17 years ago

"Chubby" is (American/Canadian) slang for an erection.

ochiba• 17 years ago

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chubby

bouncingsoul• 17 years ago

Really really bad choice of terms: it took me until the middle of the article to realize Nielson is comparing these new "mega dropdowns" to navigation with the <select> element – not one dimensional dropdowns!

ghostz002• 17 years ago

Why are they all activated on mouseover? That doesn't make any sense to me. IMO I think that mouseovers are only good for displaying tooltips or something along those lines.

What's wrong with a click?

chairface• 17 years ago

If I click on something like that, I'm expecting a page reload, not a menu.

ghostz002• 17 years ago

I agree, I would expect the same behavior, but I don't think that justifies to activate a menu on a mouseover. Nobody would like an operating system that triggered menus on mouseover. It's just to easy to trigger on accident. I know I'm in the minority on this subject, because most sites do use that technique. Only site I can think of that doesn't is google (the more link off the homepage).

Hexstream3• 17 years ago

However, is there harm in getting dynamic behavior when you're expecting a full page load?

Moreover, it would be better for consistency between the javascript-enabled and disabled versions to use a click, which could be a minor win if one sometimes uses the site with javascript and without depending on what computer they're accessing from.

Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

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