Marks delivers a big momma flyout menu
– posted April 25th, 2007 by Brian Donohue No comments
Recently I’ve been thinking a fair bit about flyout global navigation menus. You see them all the times these days, but despite their popularity, I’ve never been fond of them. I find it annoying when they accidentally appear as you move your pointer around the screen. And more importantly, as Jared Spool’s site points out, users decide first and move second, so their effectiveness as a navigation tool is questionable.
Recently, M&S have taken flyouts menu to an extreme:
Have a look yourself
Check out the new M&S site. (But be sure to ignore the useless splash page. It’s a prime counterexample to my recent post about an unexpected good one.)
These are seriously big flyout menus!
The catch is, though, I think these Marks flyouts are an example of good design.
What makes this flyout better?
The difference with this implementation is that nearly all the navigation is under one menu. (True, there are two other menus. But the guts of the site are all under the first.) So contrary to the “decide first, click second” principle, you can’t really make up your mind until you hover over “Shop all Departments”.
Critically, the menu is admirably scannable. And with this sort of global navigation available, the push to have usable link-rich home pages is entirely mitigated. Instead, Marks have an attractive, promo-driven homepage that doesn’t force the user to guess where they need to click next.
It’s surprising: by taking flyout menus to an extreme, I think M&S have actually made them more usable.
What do you think? Is this a design we all should consider using?
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Categories Design
