

Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well - henning
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html

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run4yourlives
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.)

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petercooper
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.

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run4yourlives
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.

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petercooper
In the US, perhaps. Maybe the ladies are just courser here in Europe but get a
few of them together and they're usually coming out with language that'd make
_me_ blush.

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run4yourlives
Mind the generation gap as well... as both men and women get older, language
tends to civilize.

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petercooper
In the upper middle classes and above, perhaps. In the working class, my
personal experience is the old are just as foul mouthed as the young (although
they tend to use it in the correct company, rather than everyplace). This
might sound classist, but I'm working class and it's what I've experienced in
any case.

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mixmax
_"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.

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unalone
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.

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ken
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.

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unalone
"I write about Macs and typography."

"I love David Foster Wallace and interface design."

You can say more in a sentence than you can in a cloud, and it's more personal
that way, and it's not ugly.

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jmatt
_You can say more in a sentence than you can in a cloud_

Yes, I agree. But the tag cloud will be more accurate. I can think of a number
of blogs that have pretty ambiguous or off-target taglines.

 _and it's not ugly_

Yeah there are some hideous tag clouds out there. Ugh.

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bouncingsoul
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!

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chaosmachine
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.

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

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

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

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unalone
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.

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

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bd
I went to Nielsen's first example (<http://foodnetwork.com>) with NoScript
enabled (meaning it degraded to CSS-only solution) and it worked quite well.

It was actually quite hard to get diagonal issue to be the problem, you must
follow rather unnatural path to get out of the active zone.

And 0.5s delay was detrimental, site felt snappier without it.

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Mistone
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"

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unalone
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.

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ghostz00
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?

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

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Hexstream
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.

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tdoggette
I'd be hesitant to click on a link expecting a reload if I thought that it
would take me away from the main page of the site, while the hover-activated
nav is no commitment.

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AlfaWolph
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..

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

