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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Awful usability. I expect that when hovering over a section and moving my cursor to the right I would stay within that section, but it always just reverts to home or whatever other section I've clicked.

If hovering over a section doesn't enable access to that section, then don't show the expanded version. Wait for a click event to show it at all.

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There's a good article about Amazon implementing this feature for their mega menu. Blew me away when I first read it, it's very obvious and simple in hindsight.

http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-...

Yes, there are some great tips. I still think this style menu is just bad, though. Although certain tweaks can improve the UX, it's still an frustratingly unusable interface for people with certain motor disabilities and even just older users whose mouse/trackpad skills are not great.

At this point, the department menu is an alternative to search. It doesn't need to be universally accessible or forgiving to poor motor control, because in terms of footprint it is tiny. I have used it before and it was just fine for me, and if some proportion of their customers have a similar experience, then it seems well worthwhile.

I completely disagree with this sentiment. Everything in a UI that you can do with a mouse should be tolerant of disabilities that people who use a mouse might be going throug (tremors etc). A user shouldn't have to try to do something and become frustrated in order to discover that it is "not for people with poor motor skills". We should do better. What you describe as "well worthwhile" still strikes me as woefully incomplete and annoying. Every user could potentially have poor motor skills at some point due to temporary causes.

It's not the end of the world of course. I just wouldn't think of "I have used it before and it was just fine for me" as a good reason to not strive for a more universal approach to interface design.

> Everything in a UI that you can do with a mouse should be tolerant of disabilities that people who use a mouse might be going throug (tremors etc).

Why? Should we give up on first person shooter games? Set minimum mouse target sizes for RTS games? The point of the department menu is to convert dexterity into information rapidly. If you lack dexterity, that's no strike on your character, but it somewhat defeats the purpose of a dexterity-limited input. There is an alternative to the department menu in the left side of the search bar, which has a simple list.

We're talking about websites. You're talking about games.

That technique was used long before Amazon used it. Actually, the first comment on that article confirms this: Bruce Tognazzini came up with it for Apple in 1986.

Yeah I've had to build a similar menu, it's simple solution but makes a huge usability difference.

That's not the actual Bloomberg[0] menu. This copy does not seem to implement that feature, which is one of the most important features to have I think.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/

not sure what you mean. I've clicked on your link and found the same menu as OP is showing.

No, he's correct. If you click on "Menu", move down to "Markets", and then move right, it stays on the "Markets" submenu on Bloomberg but reverts to "Home" on OP's reimplementation.

In the Bloomberg JS menu the right hand menu changes when you move up and down, but not when you move 'up and right' or 'down and right' over the left hand menu. You can move to the option you want in the left menu and then move your mouse right to get the option you want without being very accurate. In the CSS version you have to move exactly out of the left hand menu option you want to get to the correct right hand menu.

This is a great example of why it sometimes takes a lot of effort to make a good front end UI. Bloomberg's version is considerably friendlier to users.

The original implementation at bloomberg.com is really well-executed, even solving the famous problem that when you accidentally hover another menu item while moving the cursor to the right, you might activate the adjacent menu item. [1]

It took VLC ages to get rid of this issue, but it is solved as of VLC 3.0.3 (relevant Qt bug: [2]).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90NsjKvz9Ns&t=18m46s

[2] https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-20094

I agree, so I went on and fixed it! I explained what I thought was the issue, which turned out to be a very minor visual bug, and the actual issue and fix in a Medium post:

https://medium.com/@fpresencia/fixing-bloomberg-menu-mimic-6...

Edit: PR merged; removed own link

Merged!

Thanks! BTW, the :active trick is very, very neat. It took me a bit to understand that it was so you can actually click on the links. I normally use checkboxes for that, but I might find some use for the :active hack.

Graceful degredation. Use JavaScript to add in these details, but it should still work without.

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