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Chonky Menu Re-Creation

nathanmanousos.com

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#81
post #77

I scrolled straight to the bottom to try it out. I kept tapping the button and it’d appear for a split second and disappear. It took me a few tries to realize that it’s not a button and requires tap-and-drag (I’m on mobile). I suspect I’m not the only one that would have this issue. I haven’t seen this kind of “non-button button” before. Is this a common UX choice?

iOS has that ever since Force Touch. You could peek and either abort by releasing or pop it into existence as an overlay by pressing further until first haptic feedback (second one would navigate to instead of overlay), then move through menu entries and select an entry by releasing without lifting the finger. It was super quick to use and I really enjoyed it, especially in Music.app e.g to quickly build listening qu…

Force touch was the single most undiscoverable UX ever invented. Wonder how many iPhone users upgraded their devices multiple times without ever realizing it's a thing.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#82
post #59
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, maybe by mistake? I looked into it, it is the YouTube embed on the page that is triggering that, I suppose any YouTube embed will cause that.

I changed it to use lite-youtube-embed which doesn't request that stuff until after the user clicks to play the video

http://0x0.st/HOwY.png

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#83
post #32
post #13

This is great -- all the way up to the point where you have to hold and drag. The usability on a laptop goes out the window as you realize you can't accelerate past the edge of your touchpad. Getting to the top item in the menu -- maybe even the most important item -- is extremely hard. You rapidly become limited to the number of items you can have in this menu. Tap-or-swipe-to-open, and tap-or-swipe-to-close have ra…

Yeah the hold and drag interaction model sure looks fancy but isn't very ergonomic. On mobile, you're fighting to stretch to the top item, with a mouse it's very unintuitive, and with a trackpad forget about it. Tap to open makes more sense in every scenario. It's an accessibility nightmare

> Yeah the hold and drag interaction model sure looks fancy but isn't very ergonomic.

I beg to differ. I find hold-and-drag menus faster to interact with when using a mouse, trackback or a touchpad. But it is possible to support it, while not requiring it. On button down the system enters a state where one of three things can happen.

1. The button is released. Then the menu should togle open and wait for another click and relase to select an entry.

2. The pointer moves more than a threshold. Then the hold-and-drag behavior is initiated.

3. 50ms or similar pass and the hold-and-drag behavior in initiated.

The last case is to avoid flickering in case somebody has a slow click and release cycle.

This or similar behavior used to be (still is) default behavior of many desktop UI toolkits.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason Apple puts the most basic stuff behind an accessibility option. For example, tab to next button in a system dialog is disabled by default.

And, because it’s not enabled by default any more, the implementation has regressed in various situations: I don’t use macOS normally, but I did briefly around six months ago, and I immediately found several bugs in keyboard navigation within the System Preferences app, such as where some fields weren’t accessible that way, or where Shift+Tab wasn’t the opposite of Tab (e.g. {1} ⇥ {2} ⇥ {3} ⇧⇥ {1}, rather than ending…

That is one example, why I have the impression that MacOS is gowing downhill for advanced users for several releases now.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#85
post #28

(op here) Sorry this doesn't work on Android, I don't have any Android devices so I haven't tested it there, I think there are some differences in the way pointer events are handled that are messing it up. If it doesn't work for you, please have a look at the video where I demonstrate and talk through everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgrdLfDozo

I enjoyed this post quite a lot!

Any chance you could add a feed to your blog?

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#86
post #64
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, "designers" are optimising for what looks cool and fancy subjectively to them, rather than optimising for usability. In their defence, the latter is much harder :)

If you look at my other work you'll see that I'm like the polar opposite of a designer that does things that look cool and fancy rather than optimizing for usability. This was meant as a study in how to do certain types of fluid animations.

Oh I know, what I mean is that you are unfortunately thi minority, judging by the usability of much of modern software.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#87
post #13

This is great -- all the way up to the point where you have to hold and drag. The usability on a laptop goes out the window as you realize you can't accelerate past the edge of your touchpad. Getting to the top item in the menu -- maybe even the most important item -- is extremely hard. You rapidly become limited to the number of items you can have in this menu. Tap-or-swipe-to-open, and tap-or-swipe-to-close have ra…

It just plain doesn't work on my phone. The menu start closing before I can drag into it.

And even if it'd have worked I don't appreciate UI elements where I'm forced to obscure the choices I'm picking between.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#88
post #24
post #13

This is great -- all the way up to the point where you have to hold and drag. The usability on a laptop goes out the window as you realize you can't accelerate past the edge of your touchpad. Getting to the top item in the menu -- maybe even the most important item -- is extremely hard. You rapidly become limited to the number of items you can have in this menu. Tap-or-swipe-to-open, and tap-or-swipe-to-close have ra…

The original menu was built for mobile, where this isn't much of an issue, my re-creation is a bit weird because I primarily interact with it on desktop, but I followed the same ideas as the original. For a desktop-specific version of this, I'd definitely allow it to persist open after a single click. Maybe I'll add that.

The drag doesn't work on my android phone - it just closes. And I'd argue the usability is worse on a phone, where how you're holding the phone, and screen size affects basic usability to start with, and small screen size makes it more important to be able to lift my fingers to see what I'm choosing from.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#89

Very cool. I see it's using Imba and Astro - did you write your own Astro integration for Imba?

It's not a true Astro integration, but Imba works with Vite, and I was able to use that to include Imba code in my Astro site. A real integration would allow for server-side rendering of Imba components, which would be great.

Re: Chonky Menu Re-Creation

#90
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can display the menu but once you release the button it dissapear If you look at the inspiration from twitter (linked at the top of the post) you'll see that is by design.

For me it doesn't work on Chrome android. As soon as I want to select something and move my finger slightly, the menu disappears, although I am still with my finger on the button

I think I fixed the Android issues, can you give it another try?
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