Comments on: Do drop-down menus suck like a remora?

By: Janet Nagel

Janet Nagel — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:37:24 +0000

I am having trouble with the display of drop down
menus if there is a scroll bar on the page. If I scroll the page, the drop down menus get kind of duplicated so I don’t know where to click them. If I touch them with my cursor, sometimes they get fixed. I have this problem in IE and Mozilla. Can anyone help me with this problem?

By: Charles Cherry

Charles Cherry — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 21:56:13 +0000

I think cascading menus are the greatest thing since sliced bread. I can’t understand why some people here think they are so difficult to use. I teach basic computer skills to kids who use them all the time without giving them a second thought.

They are a fantastic way to quickly navigate to various pages on a website without having to click, click, click, click…

I understand the argument for accessibility, and look forward to someone creating a great web cascading menu system that can be accessed without using a mouse.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 18:29:55 +0000

The issue that I have with Suckerfish is that it doesn’t display correctly at ALL in Dreamweaver, my preferred coding environs. Once DWMX 2005 or whatever does a better job of displaying them, I’ll acquiesce.

I have used and am very happy with Youngpup’s slide out menus:

http://youngpup.net/2001/ypslideoutmenus

By: Frank Ramage

Frank Ramage — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:17:08 +0000

Think Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint:

Courtesy of Alan Cooper in “About Face” I’ll inject that menus serve a DIDACTIC role… IOW, they serve as a psuedo-memory device to support a user who’s unfamiliar with the application.

Note: If a menu changed basic structure with every application (ahem, website), they’d lose a valuable benefit… In Windows, you (can) know that Print is under the File menu, even if you’ve never used the app before.

Where does this fit into web usability?

-Frank Ramage

Once a user has found and used a menu function for a week or two, he’s ready to learn of its keyboard/toolbar shortcut.

By: greg

greg — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 02:54:26 +0000

While I AGREE that dropdowns add a ton of code, compatability issues and make the user “mouse-around” I personally haven’t found a better way to organize and/or communicate the structure of a (church or other) website that has “a bunch” of different topic areas.

I work for the State of California, and our Intranet has a half-dozen (non-dropdown) navagation models – and it drives me crazy. You have to give dropdowns credit for providing a consistent navigation methodology for complicated sites.

I am open minded – if you have a few good examples of good navigation for a complicated site w/o dropdowns – please provide the URL.

- – Greg

By: Boyink

Boyink — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:04:15 +0000

I probably should have given an example of the “increasing info with each click”…

Take a look at http://www.parentpager.com/Requirements.php. This page is the “second level”, the first being the mainn av link of “Components” (client changed some terminology after launch, the link used to match the URL…).

What this approach does is use the blurb/read more approach in place of a typical overview page (that only usually exists as a placeholder in the nav structure).

While the blurbs could use some editing for length and clarity, what appeals to me about this is it the content collectively functions as an overview (and probably does a better job than content “made up” to serve that purpose). Each “sub-page” also gets a link with a bit more description around it — which should give users confidence that the more detailed content is what they’re after.

Huh…there also used to be pictures of the components on the “Read More” pages, wonder what happened to those….

By: Bill Siddall

Bill Siddall — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 17:17:09 +0000

I’m bipolar about dropdowns. I like them if they are well done. I can get where to go faster and, if I’m new to a site, I don’t have to guess where to go to find something. (“I wonder where the directions page is. Under About Us or Worship?”) By well done, I mean the submenus snap into place (no sliding submenus, no dissolves, no animation – Flash is particularly easy to abuse) and where I don’t have to be William Tell with the mouse to navigate. If they are not well done, I hate them.

By: Tom K.

Tom K. — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 16:34:04 +0000

Safari has gotten somewhat better about the old Milonic menu. Ours now displays under newer Safari versions, it just doesn’t place properly with the “placemenu” command. I’ve got an upgrade on my to-do list as well.

I can live with dropdowns as long as they’re kept fairly small. More than about 4 items apiece and I go into overload.

By: Kristen O'Brien

Kristen O'Brien — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 16:15:15 +0000

This is a great discussion: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/7279-7-10.htm

By: How Now, Brownpau?

How Now, Brownpau? — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 15:22:37 +0000

On Dropdowns

Zeldman on Dropdown Menus. He’s of the mind that dropdowns are the product of corporate groupthink trying to make every page at every single level…