Thread: Creative navigation should be usability oriented

well we all see creativity in every sphere of web design activity if some experiment on layout others show it through use of creative colors and trying out variety through design elements. But how much ever creativity we try to do ultimately it should enhance the user's experience and not come in the way of usability.

All of your posts are so border-line close to spam.

I know I'm new here, but I think I'm justified in telling you to start posting something worth while, please.

This topic of usability in navigation is actually very interesting and requires much deeper insight than a vague two-sentence post like yours provides.

To add a little value to this post, and to educate the world on one of my pet peeves, I'd like to make a note about fly-out menus. A fly-out menu is when you have a vertical navigation like...
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
...and when you hover your mouse over an option, say "Item 1," a sub-menu expands out to the right with more options relating to that category. You'll find this kind of menu actually doesn't work very well for your users. It turns out that people just have a tendency to move the mouse at an angle when they try to go horizontally. What that means for this kind of menu is that the user will have trouble moving the cursor across from "Item 1" to the sub-items that expand from it (causing the sub-menu to close and they will have to hover over it again). Actually, in general people almost always move the mouse at an angle, even when going up and down, but on a horizontal menu with drop-down options there is substantially more room (with vertical menus you have to stay within the height of the text, whereas with horizontal ones you have the whole width of the word) and it doesn't matter that the cursor goes at an angle because it still stays within the area of the menu.

Your user doesn't have to be poorly coordinated for this to be a problem, and having a fly-out menu unexpectedly close on you even one time can be enough to aggravate a user. And it may not occur to you at first that you have this on your site: Sometimes people have horizontal menus, with drop-down menus, with fly-outs from the drop downs (so it's a sub-menu of a sub-menu) and those are still fly-outs but website owners sometimes forget they have them.