[thelist] Select Menus - Are they usefull?

[Erik Mattheis]

Is a select menu always better then regular links? Of course not.

Can a select menu be the solution to design/usability problems? Yes:
For example, it would usually be better to compact links into a
select menu than require a user to scroll the entire page to get to a
link.

They're a feature that's common to all common browsers and you should
use them when they're the best thing to use.

At 1:31 AM +0100 3/23/02, Mark Howells wrote:
>New visitors, or
>people who are not au fait with computers and the internet, may not see a
>select box as a menu.
>
>DHTML menus may be a better option

What makes it more likely that an unsophisticated user is going to
recognize as a navigation menu a "little box on the page that says
'shoes'" than a "little box on the page that says 'shoes'"?

Select menus are in applications other than web browsers ... I'd say
that a select box is _more_ likely to be recognized as something that
contains many links than a link that activates a DHTML menu ...
especially if the DHTML link isn't underlined as many aren't.
--

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- Erik Mattheis

(612) 377 2272
http://goZz.com/

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