dai11y 30/03/2021

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu

  • Mark Root-Wiley shares his thoughts on why hover-based menus should be a thing of the past. They violate Jakob’s Law of Usability: that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. This is because there are several different hover menu behaviours in the wild, so it’s impossible to predict which one a site is using until you click around. For example, is the top menu item a link to its own page, or a ‘fake’ link (href="#")?
  • Hover menus are also difficult to use on touch screen devices, which have no concept of hover, and also require careful pointer precision; it’s easy to accidentally hide the submenu again by moving the cursor out of its range.
  • Mark suggests using click menus instead, following the guidance of the US Web Design System, Bootstrap and others.

Prefer longer newsletters? You can subscribe to week11y, fortnight11y or even month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.

Loading...