From:
Michael JasonSmith
Date:
2009 Jan 05 22:43 UTC
Short link
GroupServer has four menus — site navigation, login, context-menu, and footer —
which normally work very well. However, as I work on designing the page editing
system
http://groupserver.org/r/topic/4hVtEm16lczS5gwL615Sro
I become more and more concerned about the context menu. The base-problem for
the context menu is lack of space. It is crammed to the side of the page, so it
cannot show much. Names of pages wrap, It can get very long very quickly, and
it is hard to show a hierarchy.
The problems with the hierarchy could be solved by giving up: we only show the
top-level pages. Anything beneath these can be accessed through links within
the content-section of the page. The page-editor must do more, but it is
good-practice to link from the content as people seem to suffer “menu
blindness” and only look at the content-section. A List Apart and the BBC only
links to the top-level pages in the context menu, while many other sites drop
it all together. eBay has an… interesting… solution: truncate the list of
pages.
What do you all think? Is dropping the hierarachy the end of civilisation as we
know it? (Note: the suggestion of drop-down menus will get a long rant in
response; you have been warned.)