I hate website 'D' menus!
Posted on September 13, 2006 under Random Rants.
Let us be clear, i hate creating them and i hate using them... and by "D" i mean any of the following: dynamic, DHTML, drop down... call it as you wish it refers to the same general concept and i think it's a dinosaur.</p><p>It's not that i don't acknowledge their usefulness at some point in the distant past but i think they outlived it.
So what are drop down menus after all? Well a nifty idea in the PC era. When people started working on and with computers with GUI's they needed a way to organize the plethora of options available for a program, that previously were written down in manuals and the like. Anybody remember all the options of the 'ls' command? -- Thought not. So they invented the drop down menu, a program has a menu bar on the interface and when you click on a menu category, a drop down opens with all related options: hence "File", "Edit", "Help" and the like. So in the Internet era somebody had the wise idea, that hey let's apply the same principle to websites to organize the information on a website! Keyword: "information"!
So that worked well, or somewhat well, i know quite a few people annoyed by it, as long as the primary focus of the Internet was delivery of information. But folks things have changed! The focus of the internet has evolved from just delivering information to presentation! If you're a company you're not just displaying company information you're presenting yourself, trying to elicit an emotion or reaction from the visitor so they buy your products. Consequently the whole drop down menu idea to organize information doesn't really seem to work, now does it? After all you don't want the visitor to deal with finding what he needs by himself, you want to guide him, provide him with relevant information for each incremental step. Ideally you want to be one step faster than him, read his mind and only show him everything that he needs to know, no less, but also no more choice than he really needs, lest to confuse him.
So, faced with this undeniable trend proponents of drop down menus pretty much said: 'but drop down menus are still useful for shortcuts...', seriously would you like shortcuts in your presentation? Would you like to give users the opportunity to skip through parts of your presentation so they end up with an incomplete picture and make an ill buying decision, most likely not in your favor? As for returning, trained, visitors... one click less, which is the improvement provided by the drop down menu is absolutely irrelevant! Worse, economically it's a loss because that user misses out on something important or that may have been of interest to him on the intermediary step.
Let me give you a hint have you tried quick links for those trained users if you really care about that one click, perhaps dynamic quick links... every self-respecting website out there gathers enough info about it's visitors to know what the most popular pages are, have you thought about sticking those in quick links for those "click savers" out there?
But i still didn't tell you why i hate them. Besides the whole argument above about their uselessness in most situations, i hate to use them because they are distracting and make the page load slower. I hate creating them because they use javascript, and the browser's event handler, with each browser out there accessing dhtml objects differently and more and more browsers, versions and flavors gaining popularity it's a freaking nightmare, which usually ends up in what we call extremely messy code. And that's why i hate drop down menus!
So what are drop down menus after all? Well a nifty idea in the PC era. When people started working on and with computers with GUI's they needed a way to organize the plethora of options available for a program, that previously were written down in manuals and the like. Anybody remember all the options of the 'ls' command? -- Thought not. So they invented the drop down menu, a program has a menu bar on the interface and when you click on a menu category, a drop down opens with all related options: hence "File", "Edit", "Help" and the like. So in the Internet era somebody had the wise idea, that hey let's apply the same principle to websites to organize the information on a website! Keyword: "information"!
So that worked well, or somewhat well, i know quite a few people annoyed by it, as long as the primary focus of the Internet was delivery of information. But folks things have changed! The focus of the internet has evolved from just delivering information to presentation! If you're a company you're not just displaying company information you're presenting yourself, trying to elicit an emotion or reaction from the visitor so they buy your products. Consequently the whole drop down menu idea to organize information doesn't really seem to work, now does it? After all you don't want the visitor to deal with finding what he needs by himself, you want to guide him, provide him with relevant information for each incremental step. Ideally you want to be one step faster than him, read his mind and only show him everything that he needs to know, no less, but also no more choice than he really needs, lest to confuse him.
So, faced with this undeniable trend proponents of drop down menus pretty much said: 'but drop down menus are still useful for shortcuts...', seriously would you like shortcuts in your presentation? Would you like to give users the opportunity to skip through parts of your presentation so they end up with an incomplete picture and make an ill buying decision, most likely not in your favor? As for returning, trained, visitors... one click less, which is the improvement provided by the drop down menu is absolutely irrelevant! Worse, economically it's a loss because that user misses out on something important or that may have been of interest to him on the intermediary step.
Let me give you a hint have you tried quick links for those trained users if you really care about that one click, perhaps dynamic quick links... every self-respecting website out there gathers enough info about it's visitors to know what the most popular pages are, have you thought about sticking those in quick links for those "click savers" out there?
But i still didn't tell you why i hate them. Besides the whole argument above about their uselessness in most situations, i hate to use them because they are distracting and make the page load slower. I hate creating them because they use javascript, and the browser's event handler, with each browser out there accessing dhtml objects differently and more and more browsers, versions and flavors gaining popularity it's a freaking nightmare, which usually ends up in what we call extremely messy code. And that's why i hate drop down menus!