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Comment by db48x | Hacker News Reader

That’s actually a really common implementation failure across all platforms. It crops up again and again, in virtually every new thing that people implement. It’s very common to see this problem when you activate a submenu of a menu, and want to move the mouse diagonally to pick some item from the submenu.

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https://www.nngroup.com/articles/steering-law/

Wow thanks for that.

"Your request has been blocked..." That's a new 403 page.

If anyone has the same problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20260218142023/https://www.nngro...

See here for how Amazon's mega menu was designed around this problem:

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

It's slightly irritating to see Amazon get credit for that, when Bruce Tognazzini used that same solution 40 years ago when working on the classic MacOS interface!

(Apple forgot about it again for OS X, but that's a different story.)

From the article:

> I’m sure this problem was solved years and years ago, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again.

From the NN/g article:

"older versions of MacOS featured a menu designed by NN/g principal Bruce Tognazzini; that menu did not exhibit this behavior, but instead, used a vector-based triangular buffer to allow users to move diagonally. Unfortunately, in the years since, Apple has reverted this excellent bit of interaction design."

But I'm on macOS 15 and the menus seem to behave that way (the good way). Did they re-implement it?

Yes, they did eventually. If I'm understanding correctly, the original design used a simple funnel shape with 45 degree sides (suitable for the resource-limited systems of the day), and when they eventually re-implemented it they used a funnel defined by the left hand corners of the submenu, as per the Amazon design. (See the large animgif halfway down https://thomaspark.co/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/ )

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