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Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

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Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#21

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

This has always irked me about Windows's implementation of the auto-complete box.

If I start typing, in the address bar for one example, and my mouse happens to be resting over where the auto-complete will soon appear (as is likely because I just had to move the cursor to the address bar to select it) when I hit "enter" it will go to whatever my mouse cursor was over rather than what I typed.

The auto-complete box should detect mouse MOVEMENT not mouse position. The fact that my mouse was there before the auto-complete box even rendered should be a massive red flag that I am NOT selecting something in the list.

Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#24

Post by artursapek »

masklinn wrote: post #16
mhp wrote: post #3

Maybe I'm just cynical, but this seems like the kind of thing they would have patented (not that it deserves a patent, just that they would have applied for one).

Other commenters note MacOS has been doing this since System 7.

I just tried it in Chrome. View > hover over Encoding. Move mouse down over Developer and onto the Encoding submenu. There's a definite delay, although it's much shorter than Amazon's. Move the mouse over Developer in the other direction (down and to the left), and there's no delay.

I never appreciated this, yet it affects me many times a day. Really thoughtful UX design.

Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#25

Post by bjterry »

slig wrote: post #23

Really nice! Two questions: - What's the "cross-product magic Amazon uses to detect movement inside the 'blue triangle.'"? - How did you do those GIFs?

I just happen to have this open in another tab, but only helpful if you are a Mac user: https://gist.github.com/dergachev/4627207

Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#26

Post by moron4hire »

slig wrote: post #23

Really nice! Two questions: - What's the "cross-product magic Amazon uses to detect movement inside the 'blue triangle.'"? - How did you do those GIFs?

It's not magic, it's just math. The cross product [1] between the vector of the mouse movement and the vector of the mouse's location to the menu's top left corner tells you the relative orientation of the two vectors. Compare that to cross product in regards to the menu's bottom left corner and you can easily figure out that the mouse must be moving towards the menu. This is much easier than figuring out the bounding triangle that the person drew in this article and then figuring out if the mouse is inside of it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_product

Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#27

Post by Kiro »

"See the delay? You need that, because otherwise when you try to move your mouse from the main menu to the submenu, the submenu will disappear out from under you like some sort of sick, unwinnable game of whack-a-mole."

How will a delay before displaying the submenu prevent that? If it would be a delay before it disappears I would understand but in the example it doesn't seem to have that.

Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#28

Post by adventured »

mhp wrote: post #3

Maybe I'm just cynical, but this seems like the kind of thing they would have patented (not that it deserves a patent, just that they would have applied for one).

Maybe, but I'm not aware of Amazon being a patent troll in its recent history. I'm aware of the fight they had early on with one-click checkout, but since then?

Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

#29

Post by thomaspark »

czr80 wrote: post #18

Tog wrote about implementing this in MacOS: http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/2000-07ReaderMail.html#Anch...

Here's a post about Mac Classic vs. OSX vs. Ubuntu I wrote (with figures): http://thomaspark.me/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/

Glad to see this solution for the web.

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