SeaDUG Front-End Online Meeting (9/25/18)

From Jakob Nielsen:

Should Hover-Activated Menus Be Eliminated Since Touch Devices Don’t Allow Hovering?

Finally, with the increasing traffic from touch devices, many UX designers wonder whether websites should still have hover menus.

Obviously, the hover-activated menus don’t work well for people who access a site from a touchscreen. Even if the menu is adapted to be activated by a tap rather than a hover, touchscreens are often too small to display the entire menu. This can lead to awkward, error-prone attempts to scroll the menu without accidentally deactivating the menu by tapping something else on the page.

But just because a portion of your audience can’t use a feature doesn’t mean you should prevent everyone from using it. On traditional laptops and desktops, hover-activated menus serve an important role in providing almost immediate access to a huge range of choices. The key is graceful degradation: make sure that users who can’t interact by hovering can still access your content.

You don’t need to look far for an example of how to do this properly. The full Fedex website provides quick access to all their shipping methods using hover-activated menus. These menus would be unwieldy on a small touchscreen, so they are replaced with a simpler tap-activated menu.