Usability - Web Development Articles

Tackling Hierarchical Menu Issues with Drupal and jQuery

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 11/29/2011 - 15:23

One of the decisions we make when creating a hierarchical menu for a website is whether to create a "landing page" for each section. In other words, does each parent menu item have its own page?

There are three options. Each parent item can:

Hover menus: Boon or Bane for the User Experience?

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 21:30

Yesterday, I read a really good article about the negative impacts of hover menus at uxmovement.com. In it, the author brings up some good points about how hover menus (also called pulldown or rollover menus) can negatively impact the user experience on your web site.

He did a great job of explaining the pitfalls of hover menus. I'd like to add a couple more and then talk about reasons why clients ask for hover menus in the first place.

The Art of Linking - Don't "click here"

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 18:19

Years ago, the W3C made recommendations regarding how to create effective links. It goes against much of what we've become accustomed to seeing on the web. The gist of it is that your links should contain text descriptive of the site or page to which you're linking. They recommend that we avoid using non-descriptive text (e.g. "Click here") or verbs (e.g. "Download").