[Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions (long drop downs)

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

I posted an example just like this to my site a while back:

Excuse me, your Johnson & Johnson is showing...
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/2002_01_06_crocolyle_archive.html#8533083

<excerpt>
Why would a designer say "let's bombard our customers and potential 
investors with no less than nine, yes *9*, drop-down navigation boxes"? 
Notice that some drop-downs only have one choice -- why not just use a 
simple link?! I suppose someone said something about "we have to be 
consistent for usability's sake", bastardizing the precepts of User 
Interface Engineering like a religious zealot quoting scripture out of 
context. Also note that the "Company websites" drop-down has 368 
options in it!!!! This has got to be some kind of nightmarish UI 
record. See the linkable list of web sites for a sense of the number of 
sites in the drop-down. (Scroll down to see the full list.) Evidently 
they need to learn the concept of "Information Architecture".
</excerpt>

Boy did I have the rant tone going that day or what?   Blatantly 
irresponsible UI design can really get me worked up.  :)

Okay, so it's not as nightmarish as the 911 example cited, but a good 
example of how a large multi-national abuses drop-downs instead of 
creating a usable enterprise IA.

(...and yes, I DID do a count to find out that there were exactly 368 
items in the list.)

See the post for related links.

For the record Christina, your first question proved not to be a 
"quickie".  :)

Regards,

Lyle Kantrovich
User Experience Architect

Croc O' Lyle: a personal web log on usability, IA, and web design
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com



-----Original Message-----
From: cwodtke at eleganthack.com [mailto:cwodtke at eleganthack.com]
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 2:35 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] aother one of them quickie questions


anyone have an example of one of those nightmare long dropdowns that has
everyting on the site in it?

I was just readign this great article
http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/aug00/article_miller.html
and it seems to me that it has a lot of bearing on how we design 
dropdown
menus.

Content Management Symposium, Chicago O'Hare Marriott, June 28 - 30.
See http://www.asis.org/CM

ASIST SIG IA: http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGIA/index.html
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