Foraging à la carte: an appetite for popup menus?

Reviewer: Susan Loretta Fowler

This is a little gem of an article. In two pages, Hudson explains why Web designers should consider using popup menus, despite their bad reputation from a usability point of view. Popup menus on Web sites can be either drop-downs or fly-outs. A drop-down menu opens downward into a list of options. A fly-out menu opens a list to the right. In either case, when the user clicks a choice or clicks away from the menu, the menu is closed. The most important advantage of popup menus, says Hudson, is that they make it easier for users to navigate a site, since users can stay on the same page, rather than going to a new page, finding that it was the wrong choice, going back, starting over, and so on. The perceived disadvantage is that these menus are less usable than a straightforward set of links. Hudson suggests several design possibilities to help circumvent these usability difficulties. First, he advises against cascading lists (opening a list from a list), since cascades require too much manual dexterity. Second, Hudson suggests making the menu text large enough to read and select comfortably. It doesn't matter if a popup menu covers a large section of the screen, since it's on the screen for only a short while. Third, he encourages designers to include a breadcrumb navigation line that shows users how they got to the current page, and lets them retrace their steps. Finally, designers should make sure that the menus work with older browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers. One strategy is to open a static Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page if the user clicks the menu name itself. Try it on http://www.microsoft.com. If you hold the pointer over Learning Tools, a fly-out menu opens; if you click Learning Tools instead, a new page listing the menu options opens. In summary, popup menus are underused. As Hudson says in his conclusion, For the usability conscious, being told to use popup menus sounds a little counterintuitive. But the technology is now fairly mature and Web users are more sophisticated than they were when dynamic menus first appeared. Popup menus do have a place in the Web usability toolbox (p. 64). Online Computing Reviews Service