Archive for September, 2009
Show/Hide Delays on Mega Drop Down Menus
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
I have been working on a mega drop down menu system for quite a while using the recommended show/hide delays of about 0.1seconds to show the drop down and about 0.5 seconds to hide the dropdown (Jakob Nielsen).
After playing with this for quite some time I have realised that this is not the hard and fast rule I had originally assumed.
The menu I am looking at has two drop downs. The first shows an extensive product range. To make this easier to navigate, it is arranged in groups so that you run your mouse vertically down the left side of the menu. Until you do this, nothing appears on the right side (apart from some instructions). This means that your only option is to run your mouse vertically down, so there is no way you can leave the ‘hotspot’ that keeps the menu open. On top of that if you play with your CSS a bit you can extend the ‘hotspot’ a little outside the button which further reduces any problems.
The second menu is a contact us system with a small form and a map to mouseover and click on. This is at the end of the horizontal menu, so again with the correct use of some CSS, cutting across the menu bar doesn’t result in the menu closing.
Having said all this, what is the downside of having a menu closing later. The main one is that you can run across the main menu bar and have multiple drop downs open at once. Although you could fix this with javascript, this adds code when there is no real reason to.
Of coarse this all depends on the type of menu you are designing!
Tags: delays, mega drop down, show/hide, usability
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