The worst mistake you can make as a user experience designer

There is nothing worse than navigating your mouse to click a link, only to find out the link was actually a dropdown menu. But it's too late, because you already clicked the link, so you're already being taken to a new page.

Example:

The problem? There is no indication this is a dropdown menu. It just looks like a link to a regular page.

So how should it work? If it's a hoverable area, the area shouldn't be clickable because you don't want to take the user to a different page if they click it. I wish more UX designers understood this basic concept. I cannot begin to explain the spout of frustration I just dealt with internally as I just ran into this on Verizon's website.

Comments

Uh-oh. I think I'm guilty of this one on our church's website (harborchurch.org). How do you avoid the redundancy problem? If it's a drop down menu, you'd assume that each link below it would be related to the word at the head of the menu. So what do you do for multiple pages under the heading "About Us" when you want to have one page about the staff, one page about the history, and one page that is actually just "About Us"? If making the head of the menu an active link itself is wrong, then you'd need to have a separate link in the drop down menu called "About Us"--which just looks really redundant. Thoughts?
hmmm. I also get huffy when I encounter this UI blunder-- but I've had clients who *insist* that link be clickable AND drop-down-able... Makes no sense at all...
" click a link, only to find out the link was actually a dropdown menu. But it's too late, because you already clicked the link, so you're already being taken to a new page."

You click the link and a drop-down menu appears or you click the link and you are taken to a new page? Your visual shows you click the link and see the drop-down menu, not a new page. Explain.

Add a comment