[Sigia-l] Using Flash Rollovers to Uncover Information

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

Katie,

The VW home page's "choose a model" example (www.vw.com) is pretty 
simple and seemingly harmless.  It's a good example of using 
"progressive disclosure."  I actually like the Toyota site's approach 
better though (www.toyota.com).  You have to select "vehicles" on the 
home page and then you can go to a "model selector" which provides a 
nice level of info and ways to process the list of vehicles and compare 
between them - not by all attributes of a vehicle, but rather by three 
key attributes that consumers likely care most about (price, MPG, and # 
of passengers).  In comparison, the VW approach makes you rollover a 
vehicle model, remember the base price, rollover another and then 
compare the price in your memory with the price on the screen - this 
puts a much higher physical and cognitive load on the user.  

Toyota does a good job of using the power of interaction to reduce the 
work load on the user by designing more of a tool.  Users don't want 
"content" they want help making decisions, completing tasks, etc.  You 
might try asking your team if you can try to do something similar.

The Vonage home page (www.vonage.com) on the other hand is a mess.  
EVERYTHING is "hot" and clickable - especially below the "fold".  The 
flash piece with what looks like different plans is very bad for a 
number of reasons:
- No heading (what is this a list of?)
- No clear indication that something is a "rollover" vs. just 
graphic/text/regular link
- Rollover delays before firing - not all bad, but quickly rolling over 
it you might not realize you're missing a whole bunch of navigation 
options
- Size of target that activate rollover is small and doesn't map to the 
highlighted area
- No clear way to "unhide" the content under the rolled out content
- Not all blue text is a link
- Multiple cascading rollovers...
- Slow rendering of "rolled out" content
- Etc...

The Vonage home page is a great example of a company that can't 
prioritize their content or user tasks.  E.g. Do I really need to be 
only 1-click from a description of what "call forwarding" is?  Maybe 
what the user really needs is a simple way to compare plans, but they 
likely don't need a comprehensive list of all the "free features."

Look at their site map and you might be amazed at how little is actually 
on the site: http://vonage.com/sitemap.php  Evidently they wanted 
everything just one click away.

You also might consider whether non-human "users" (e.g. Googlebot) will 
be able to access the dynamic content.  Findability from Google and 
other engines is likely also important in the overall success of the 
site.

I haven't done any specific testing on this, although you might know 
about a recent test I was involved in where we got rid of DHTML rollover 
menus in the navigation.  The issue there was that people could actually 
miss out on key content by jumping too deep too quickly...  E.g. by 
jumping past 2nd level pages, a user going directly to a 3rd level page 
can't "discover" other related content that might be available from the 
2nd level page...

If you're trying to justify your design recommendation, I'd ask what 
other options your team considered and what pros/cons you weighed before 
recommending rollovers.  There's always more than one way to skin a 
cat...

Lyle

----
Lyle Kantrovich
User Experience Architect
Cargill 
http://www.cargill.com/

Croc O' Lyle - Personal Commentary on usability, information 
architecture and design.
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." 
	- Leonardo da Vinci