Posts Tagged ‘usability’
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
Posted in usability | No Comments »
iPhone Icon Confusion
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
This is actually a copy of a post from my personal blog http://simongriffiths.name. To be honest I think it is probably more relevant here.
I have recently updated my iPod touch with iPhone software 3.0, but to be honest I think that this is an issue that pre-dates the new software.
I have noticed that when I am going to play audio contents, which with me tends to be audiobooks or podcasts, my finger is never too sure what to do. It knows the icon is at the bottom of the screen but floats around not being sure what to hit.
Having thought about this for a while I think that it is a usability problem that relates to the icon definitions iTunes and Music.
When I go to play music or any audio content on my mac I always use iTunes. So the natural place for my finger to go is the iTunes logo. However I have found that if I am looking to play music I notice that there is a logo called music and that’s where I go. When you are looking for an audio book though you would not characterised this as falling under the music button and are more happy with it falling under the traditional iTunes description. This leads to the uncertainty and finger wavering that I often find myself doing.
In practical terms this is a simple mislabelling of icons. It would be relatively easy to have an icon that represented iTunes but label the button store (as it would be in the pc version).
The ‘music’ button is a bit more problematic. You could rename it ‘audio’ but would the average user know what that was? Instead of that, ‘listen’ might be a more appropriate label as this would be the action the user is trying to perform, and would cover everything from music and audio books through to podcasts.
It would be interesting to see if this relabelling did happen, would there would be an end to my finger wavering forever!
Tags: icons, iphone, ipod touch, usability
Posted in usability | No Comments »