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Usability and Fly-Out Menus : D. Keith Robinson's Asterisk

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Saved by 5 people (2 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-08-01


Public Comment

on 2006-08-01 by benxshen

這篇文章探討了有關跳出式選單 (fly-out menus) 設計的可用性。可以供網頁設計人員參考討論。

Public Sticky notes

We found users follow a pattern: they decide what they are going to click on before they move the mouse…Unfortunately the information in fly outs, rollovers, or dropdowns can’t help users decide where to click because the information isn’t available to users when they are making their decision. It isn’t until after they’ve decided where to click that they see what the element has to say.

Highlighted by om19bao

We did extensive user testing and found that people didn’t mind drilling down as long as they could get back to where they started, had access to the search, knew where they were and felt like they were on the right track.

Highlighted by wade

Lets not forget about the accessibility problems they produce… yes, to people, but even more so to search engines. I have had to work on sites that use flyouts for primary navigation where the search engine couldn’t find a thing past the home page because of this. It’s ugly.. really ugly.

Highlighted by wade

As for the comment that submenus are “unfit for public sites”, again, I don’t really understand this sentiment. I would say they are perhaps unfit for smallish sites like blogs, but when you have a major media site which not only has a lot of top-level categories, but which goes a few levels deep as well, they can really help you get places quickly. Especially with how heavy pages are getting these days, it’s nice to be able to skip the “World” landing page and go straight to the Africa news page if I know what I’m doing.

Highlighted by wade

I like the idea of submenus as a site map on every page. The University of Florida’s home page does offer quite a bit of site structure information; however, through a submenu system, all those links can still be availible to a user on a page that has content on it as well. By no means is a submenu system a replacement for a good sitemap that shows everything at once.

Highlighted by wade

One thing that consistently comes up for us is the preference for navigation along an x-axis and submenus which appear underneath.

Highlighted by wade

Let’s face it: the user understands the concept and useage of the pull-down-menu. We use them every day in virtually every desktop application we run. They are compact, unobtrusive and elegant. They allow us to present a wealth of content in a very small area. If they are keyboard accessible too, then there is nothing to touch them.

Highlighted by wade

The article says users have a pattern of deciding, then acting. What other possibility is there? Can one act first, then decide? Fly-out menus give you choices. After you decide you take an action, then you are given other choices. It seems to me this is the same as making your first choice, then being taken to another page where you are given additional choices. Fly-out menus simply avoid the additional intermediate page fetch before you arrive at your final choice. The only alternative is to be given all the choices openly on the first page, as is done in the Florida site. This, of course, uses up screen space.

Highlighted by wade

27. Mike said:

Hey Keith, check out Travelocity’s new site. The dropdown/flyout menus there are really well implemented.

Posted on March 26, 2004 10:47 AM | #

28. caiuschen said:

Something clicked when I went to the Travelocity site. I was there before. And while the fly-out was a surprise to me the first time, I remember it being a pleasant surprise that I liked. It was because I never expect large sites to display all their navigation information on one page; when they do, it usually looks very cluttered. So I expect to need to guess which category I need to click on and hope the right subcategory is there. With the fly-out, I didn’t need to guess.

Highlighted by wade

  • for mouseover menus, don’t hide the menu instantly on mouseout. A delay of about 250ms prevents the menu from hiding instantly when going to a submenu. The aveda site errs here, and with all those subs and no highlighted path, it’s quite frustrating to have to re-find a deeply-nested item.

    • Highlighted by wade