| The Company |
| Resources |
| Floating menus |
| Commentaries |
| Personal |
|
Floating menus
These are the menus that 'move' as you scroll the web page up and down (sometimes left and right).
They can be distracting and often suffer from the same sorts of problems as popup menus, namely -
- User has different size screen, if the user has a different resolution screen to the designer often the point
to click on is not always matched correctly. This is the 'hot spot' or 'sweet spot' of the menu
item, that is appearing in a different place to where the software expects it to be.
- User cannot see the menu item properly as the web page is designed for a much lower screen resolution. This can be seen
on websites that are designed for 1024 x 768 (or smaller screens) and appear as a strip on the screen either centrally
or to one side (usually the left hand side), with often a large white border. This is even worse on WIDEsceen format, as
you end up with large white borders and often cannot expand the browser up to full screen mode. The text is often small
as the same size text on a smaller screen would be larger.
- User has different browser (or older version of the same browser) as the designer, often the software used to generate
these popup menus is browser specific, so will not work for all users.
- Disabled users, including the partially sighted and blind users with text to speech readers, have great difficulty with
these menu systems.
- User either does not have the EXTRA software (flash....) or the same version of software as the designer, so the software does not work.
- User has Newer versions of the software than the site was designed with, and as the site has not been updated, the
menu system fails. Fancy methods need CONTINUAL updates to keep up with version changes in other parts of the software.
- Badly written software for menus that clears the popup menus, too quickly, or without enough hysterisis to allow for mouse
pointer to traverse from the top menu item to the popup menu box.
Often they can SLOW the display of web pages as they are being scrolled.
These are not a recommended way of doing menus.
|