[thelist] Select Menus - Are they usefull?

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Sat Mar 23 11:03:01 CST 2002


> From: "Donald Noble" <donald at accessiblecomputers.co.uk>
>
> I would like peoples opinion on whether using <selects> to create a
> 'drop down menu' are usefull?

they can be useful...  they can also be frustrating, and even barriers to
content on the site...

> On our site <http://www.AccessibleComputers.co.uk> I use one as part
> of the header to allow users to quickly get to any product type, the
> second level in a 3 tiered navigation system.

except it isn't labeled "Products", it's self-labeled "Jump to..."

before i even click on it, i have no idea what it might include, however, based
on the self-label, i expect it to offer options to the most commonly-accessed
pages on the site -- contact, a price list, catalog home, whatever they are...
kind of like what your 'hot links' box offers...

instead, i'm presented with:

"Jump to...

PC Systems

Antivirus
..."

is this a product list?  ok, so you've used blank options to delineate that this
stuff is for PCs... so i scroll down looking for "Mac Systems", and there isn't
one...

ok... so they're all PC Systems, right?  i can't tell... there's no hierarchy (cuz
it's a select menu) and there's only two blank lines to imply that PC Systems
*means* something, but i have no idea *what* it means...

ok, fine, whatever... i'm going to look for prices on flat panel displays...

click... scroll... scroll... nothing under "flat", nothing under "displays", guess
"monitors" is my best option, although i had to scan the entire menu to be
sure (full scroll up and down with the mouse)... so, click to select... click to
"go"...

so, it took me no less than 5 clicks (2 or three of which were scrolling) to
make sense of the menu, find my option, and select it...

sure, you've saved space, but you've wasted my time...

guess which is more important to me?

> I have read material by both Jukka Korpela and Jakob Nielsen, who both
> argue against them, but it does provide a compact method of showing a
> lot of choices.

compact *only* to you, it certainly failed to benefit me as a user in any way...

ultimately, select menus can certainly be useful, and your average web surfer
is used to them... however, they present too many steps to see options (i
never even use them on sites), can easily block search engines, can be
barriers to accessibility, and usually are used only for the *designer*, not the
*user*...

i consider your menu, while not intrinsically bad, a good example of *why* the
damn things are so confusing and slow to use...

in your shoes, i'd gut it... the benefits would outweight the moderate hassle of
a design modification...

> The form is submited to a php page, which rediects to the correct
> page, so JavaScript dependancy is not an issue here.

luckily... a JS form wouldn't have worked for me...




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