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But what if your host and hostess pointed you to their refrigerator and said, "Help yourself".
That's the way I feel when a website hands me one of those danged mouseover dropdown css dhtml menu system thingies. It's like they don't think enough of me to organize their groceries into a decent meal, they just tell me to hit the kitchen and fend for myself.
I put the mouse over a promising, top level menu choice and -- FLASH! -- no, I can't click there: something else pops up with a bunch of words on it. Then I accidentally move my hand a smidge while I'm trying to read the interloper, and now the thing vanishes.
Not only must I raid the fridge, but now the contraption has a broken hinge and the door slams on my fingers. So I put a low level cramp in my wrist, just to make sure that I don't move my hand whilst my eyes are trying to take in the choices. Happy dinner party.
I don't know the name of the clever geek who created the first one of these, but I'll guarantee you it wasn't a marketer, and it wasn't an Information Architect. The mouseover options do a lousy job in both those departments.
No, the inventor in this case had to be a code-freak, a total techie strutting their stuff, a major show-off of an IT ego.
And I'll tell you something else. Just look at the menu choices the next time you land on a site with one of these little contraptions. Are the categories arranged the way you think, as an outsider? Or are the slices of information more the way the organization thinks about itself, internally.
I'll bet you it's the latter -- but a good IA would be created around the former. If you care about your guests, you don't throw every possible ingredient at them on every page in fear that they might miss something.
Instead, you slice, dice and organize your stuff into bite sized goodies that make sense to a visitor's palate. A menu that allows them to choose a tasty, intuitive path to whatever they need. You create a coordinated meal, a banquet even, with maybe a chance to find an unexpected but tasty side dish along the way.
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This rant was stimulated by a recent professional event - my second chance to remove a mouseover menu from an already functioning site, and measure the results. This time, the Home Page with DHTML had a 45% abandonment rate -- 9 out of 20 visitors were one hit wonders. Remove the DHTML menu and guess what? The abandonment rate fell nearly in half.
My earlier experience saw a 32% increase in page-views per unique with a similar change. And then we went to work on the IA and it got even better.
Mouseover menus? Please Say NO!
What we're doing is just removing the DHTML menu -- no other changes required because there already is a "nav2" on the pages anyway -- and then we'll be taking a 4 week measure of changes.
This should be a very good, real world test of what I already suspect is the case.
Read all the Jakob Nielsen you want, his point is to keep it simple and avoid the chance that your audience may become discouraged with slow download speeds.
I wonder, if the website were designed with the foresight to anticipate your interests as part of a general audience, would the menus accomodate your needs muc faster and appropriately, making the visit more enjoable rather than annoying with the "help yourself" menus.
DaVinci was said that there is a statue in every rock, it's our jobs to widdle it down into a masterpiece.
pvh
WHY USE THEM?
* Compresses menu items into minimal screen real-estate, eliminating distractions and helping user focus on items in main content area
* Allows for simple unclutered design
* Helps minimize the number of clicks to destination - good for advanced users
* Serves as a means to gain overview of sites' breadth and depth without having
* to navigate thru the pages (kinda like the ill-fated sitemap pages) User are already used to menus from non-web software applications
WHY NOT TO USE THEM* Hard to ensure consistent implement across all platforms and browsers
* Accessibility issues. If menus are only visible after they are moused over, then a screen reader will not see them as links
* User test have shown that many users have difficulty using them, since some require precise mousing skills to select the right item (especially menu selection requires an "L" mouse movement. Diagonal movement sometime deselects the menu)
* The options remain hidden until they are "discovered"
* Users are confused by the inconsistent behavior implementations
* Usability studieshave shown users decide what they are going click before they move the mouse
As far as I can see, all substantive complaints about these things are due to bad implementation, as tedster initially also wrote at the beginning of this thread. So the point should be this as far as I can see: bad information design leads to bad navigation, and drop menus in a bad navigation scheme probably make things worse, especially when they themselves are poorly implemented, as most are.
Anyway, thanks for the links, I was however a little disappointed with how little information of substance there was in any of those links, do you have to pay to get the real results?
Usability studies have shown users decide what they are going click before they move the mouseSo if they know where they are going, and the drop menus save them a step on the way, this seems like a plus, not a minus.
The point is that the sudden appearance of the drop-down menu DISRUPTS the decision a user has already made. Users decide to click based on what is visible, then they move for that target link, and then the interface throws them a curve ball.
Usability studies have shown users decide what they are going click before they move the mouseSo if they know where they are going, and the drop menus save them a step on the way, this seems like a plus, not a minus.
The point is that the sudden appearance of the drop-down menu DISRUPTS the decision a user has already made. Users decide to click based on what is visible, then they move for that target link, and then the interface throws them a curve ball.
My take on this had been that it was a mistake to hide links in DHTML menus because the user may just hit the back button if they don't see what they want on the page.
However, my favorite reason to get rid of DHTML menus is this: [websiteoptimization.com...]
in which we learn that Brett is not compressing his pages. The point is though that extra javascript etc... does not come without a cost.
But the proof is in the pudding, and I'm eager to hear of tedster's results.
I'll quote digitalghost here:
Clear navigation (sales have dropped on every site we’ve added drop down menus to.)
[webmasterworld.com...]
What I am hearing frequently from regular visitors is that most of them appreciate having "everything at their fingertips". They like to be able to make quick and straight click path "right to the information" they want.
What I hear from first time visitors is that the amount of information that is available is "just too much to deal with" and "overwhelming". They feel they have a "long journey" to make if they ever want to become familiar with the site.
What I am hearing frequently from regular visitors is that most of them appreciate having "everything at their fingertips". They like to be able to make quick and straight click path "right to the information" they want.
Tedster: thanks adding that. This is really the core point. If you know where you are going, then getting there faster is good.
What I hear from first time visitors is that the amount of information that is available is "just too much to deal with" and "overwhelming". They feel they have a "long journey" to make if they ever want to become familiar with the site.
It seems to me that very simple choices might mitigate this problem somewhat, for instance, no multilevel drop menus, just very clearly labeled, logical choices, as is the case with most tech sites:
support:
-drivers
-documentation
-faqs
-live support
and so on. If you can cut down on the initial range of menu choices, this simplifies the process, and makes the navigation less confusing, and if options appear only when you select an item, this might be helpful.
One thing that strikes me as somewhat odd in this is that all computer users use drop menus every day, every time you click your 'start' button on windows you are accessing a hierarchy of mulitdimensional drop menus, same for any software menu tool bar menu item. This isn't alien behavior to people, but the major difference I would suspect is that in the case of OS's and software apps, there is a huge amount of effort and thought put into this navigation scheme, it's not an afterthought. It strikes me that duplicating the logic found in those cases as closely as possible with drop menus might not be a bad idea.
On the minus side, the note on sales dropping when drop menus are added (of course, there's no way to know how they were implemented from that statement, since most are badly done it would be nice to see a controlled study on that, using only well designed and implemented menus, kept very simple). I would tend to believe this too, I've definitely noticed that very few shopping sitets use drop menus, usually preferring long lists of choices in the left nav bar.
As is usually the case with topics like this, it would seem that there are sometimes occasions when drop menus are good, and sometimes occasions when they are bad. And if they are poorly implemented, then they are bad in all cases.
