The new Digg menu is highly usable.
Take a look at http://digg.com/news/technology. Try to click on the down arrows to the right of each menu item on the top strip and you will see a menu folding down, with sub menus folding down as well. Also, all the contents of the menu are displayed in the second horizontal strip.
Improving the drupal core menu navigation to create a digg-like menu would be fantastic - it's very high usability.
What do you think would be the requirements for such a task?
Do you know of a drupal menu which is currently doing something similar?
Which high quality and easily expandable module would you recommend to start with?
Who do you think would need to join for this endavor to be successfull?
If you are developers and would like to join, please put there a note.
Feel free to edit this page with answers.
Thanks in advance,
Amnon
Yes, looks totally awesome.
Yet, maybe a bit much, cause it is duplicating the menu experience. For me, it would be enough to have a normal Dropdown menu with first sublevel appearing, this being doubled in the second horizontal row.
Thomas (user eigentor)
Unfortunately this is a wikipage, so I can't comment on it, or unfortunately this is a wiki page, which can't be commented on -- depending on how you see it.
In answer to your search:
- DHTML menu, my favourite, difficult to make horizontal
- Nice menus, horizontal and vertical, javascript-less, impressive use of CSS
- Active Menu, a windows file tree like menu tree with + and - boxes, part of JS tools, no horizontal AFAIK
- Drupal Administration Menu, the menu for administrative purposes (sun)
The digg menu looks pretty much like your classic CSS/DHTML menu, with a click instead of a rollover being the trigger event to reveal the menu.
We've found a number menus like OpenCube's Infinite Menus and Quick Menus that are accessible and easily customizable, but that don't perform so well on a high-traffic Drupal site.
The perfect menu is, well, the Holy Grail of usability. The perfect menus is a combination of built-in features and PHP wrangling in template.php. I've gone ahead and turned it into a forum topic (http://drupal.org/node/178665) under theme development.Each menu should be its own sub-topic, so folks can critique and comment extensively on integrating it into Drupal.
The new Digg menu is highly usable.
Hmmm...
- A hover highlights both the menu item and the arrow down at the same time, but clicking the menu item and clicking the arrow down result in different actions.
- The menu item / arrow down and the submenu graphically have no connection.
- Once deselected the arrow down (and menu item) stays highlighted.
I believe there is room for improvement.
rszrama's reply: I actually found the menu to be a little confusing. The fact that clicking on the same menu item in two different places results in different actions (browsing to the section vs. expanding the menu) is very confusing. Then having to click the down arrow again made it worse. Honestly, I think the most "usable" menus we'll find are the ones people are most "used" to... which are Windows style menus. You click on it once to expand, and any further expansions are denoted w/ the right pointing arrow and expand automatically when hovered. The menu titles themselves wouldn't be links. For an example, click on your Bookmarks menu item in Firefox.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this is the best way to browse a website. This may be good for sites using Drupal as a general application framework where browsers are actually users who have come to perform tasks... but for general browsing, I don't think it's the way to go.