The “Mega” Drop Down
I love it when the web development world comes up with a cool name for a new interface element…this one may not qualify as being all that original. I’m starting to see these types of elements alot more often on websites and a recent post in Signal vs. Noise was my starting point for looking at this a bit further.
So…what makes a drop down “MEGA”? According to Jacob Neilsen, a Mega Drop Downs are:
- Big, two-dimensional panels divided into groups of navigation options
- Navigation choices structured through layout, typography, and (sometimes) icons
- Everything visible at once — no scrolling
- Vertical or horizontal form factors when activated from top navigation bars; when activated from left-hand navigation, they might appear as mega fly-outs (not shown).
I saw this a while ago, but really like this example at Apple’s website when searching:
Hill and Knowlton’s UK website uses one that’s less visual, but starts to expand on the concept of a regular drop down menu:
Neilsen goes even further in his analysis of these menus with the following rules:
- the menu should render within 0.1 seconds
- the mouse should remain stationary for 0.5 seconds before displaying the menu
Fairly strict rules that most sites don’t seem to follow…and good luck making sure that a complex UI element like this will display in 0.1 seconds on all systems, but at least there are some goals for which we can attempt to attain.