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?
Since others answered the harder question: camtasia+gifbrewery
Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
131–140 of 203 posts
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off-topic, but can't miss this opportunity: Please tell us why the Amazon homepage doesn't auto-focus into the search box. I think of this every single time I go to the site.
Plausibly it tests out that people who expect the arrow keys / space to scroll the page get more annoyed by having to click out of a search box than people who want to search right away get annoyed by having to click into a search box.
It seems like it would be easy to capture 'space' and arrows keys in the textfield and do the right thing. Anyone seen someone do that?
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plausibly it tests out that people who expect the arrow keys / space to scroll the page get more annoyed by having to click out of a search box than people who want to search right away get annoyed by having to click into a search box.
It seems like it would be easy to capture 'space' and arrows keys in the textfield and do the right thing. Anyone seen someone do that?
You wouldn't want to capture the space key because you'll need that in search queries but the arrow keys sound like an idea for those interested in accommodating both cases.
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you move your mouse straight down within the left side, the submenu should change immediately.
Pretty sure that's possible without tracking the direction of the mouse, by simply not hiding/showing the submenu but changing its contents when the mouse hovers over a different menu element.
No, because you can pass through another menu item on the left without meaning to change the submenu on the right:
https://raw.github.com/kamens/jQuery-menu-aim/master/amazon....
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#135For comparison to native applications: - Firefox 19 uses the delay technique - GTK3 uses the triangle technique - Tk 8.6 does what bootstrap does - I can't figure out what Qt 4 does
Thanks for the list. We were quite literally discussing this at work only yesterday, because the IntelliJ interface doesn't do anything. They use the Java Swing toolkit, which doesn't have any special treatement of sub-menu's.
I was still dissapointed, not because Swing doesn't support it (I can't stand the default Swing Look and Feel), but because everything about their custom Look and Feel is awesome compared to default Swing, so I was hoping that they had added this feature too.
I'm hoping that the open source community edition includes the source for their Look and Feel, but I'll have to wait until I've finished checking out the 1GB of source from github and then start trawling through it.
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#136Hey all, I'm on the team that built this. We also built the redesign that launched last year. In fact, this was part of that. The article pretty much nails our implementation. Point of fact: Our team is recruiting. If you dig UX projects like this, shoot our manager Chad an email: chaddes at amazon dot com
Off-topic, but can't miss this opportunity: Please tell us why the Amazon homepage doesn't auto-focus into the search box. I think of this every single time I go to the site.
Please DO NOT listen to this guy. This auto-focus to the search box misfeature absolutely ruins any page viewing navigation.
For people who use up/down arrow or pgup/pgdown keys to scroll down the page (which is pretty much all laptop users), this focus stealing misfeature would frustrate them to no end.
I won't go back to any site that does this.
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like it would be easy to capture 'space' and arrows keys in the textfield and do the right thing. Anyone seen someone do that?
You wouldn't want to capture the space key because you'll need that in search queries but the arrow keys sound like an idea for those interested in accommodating both cases.
You pretty much never want a space at the start of your search query though, so you could DTRT based on whether there's preceding text there or not.
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off-topic, but can't miss this opportunity: Please tell us why the Amazon homepage doesn't auto-focus into the search box. I think of this every single time I go to the site.
Please DO NOT listen to this guy. This auto-focus to the search box misfeature absolutely ruins any page viewing navigation. For people who use up/down arrow or pgup/pgdown keys to scroll down the page (which is pretty much all laptop users), this focus stealing misfeature would frustrate them to no end. I won't go back to any site that does this.
Is it still a misfeature on pages that fit on one screen, e.g. google.com, or (my own company's) mixrank.com?
Isn't a better strategy to optimize for the common use-case?
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#139This 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 sh…
The exact same happens with GMail.
I use the keyboard shortcut "L" to label my mails. But because my mouse is usually somewhere around the location of the labels submenu before it even renders, I'll often apply the wrong label: the one at the mouse's position rather than the first one in the list. On a side note, starting to type actually hides the mouse cursor, so it took me some time to figure out why the 4th label was applied and not the 1st one.
Re: Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown
#140[deleted]