I first heard the term mega drop-down from usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. Not sure it’s a technical term, but it refers to hover-over, drop-down navigation extraordinaire that has categories, columns, links and more. It’s super helpful, and it’s a key component of Yahoo!’s new interface.
Mega drop-downs fly out from shortcuts sidebar
The new Yahoo! homepage sports a “favorites” bar along the left hand side. Icon/links for key areas of interest like sports, finance, facebook, eBay and a dozen or so other topics are included. Here’s the mega part: when you hover over any of the icons, a mega drop-down pops out, with a few key piece of info — stuff you’re most likely to want to see (or at least that’s what the designers are banking on). For example, a quick hover gives you the state of the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P. Place your mouse over eBay, and you’ll see the most-watched items, and a search box. Facebook gives you direct access to your login. True to its original intent, Yahoo! has once again made itself a reason to be your portal.
This is also a brilliant move for advertising, as each of the mega drop-downs has room for an ad… which of course, is targeted to the area of interest. Nice job of combining user benefits with money-making options for the site.
— Andrea Zuegel
Unfortunately, and ultimately a short-coming for advertisers is that “mega-dropdowns” aren’t very elegant. Especially ones containing ads, the user-experience (i.e. loading time) is dragged down because the implementation is dependent on third-party ad servers, a notorious source of delayed load times, and general mucking of major portals like Yahoo. This feature looks nice in theory, and has promise, but think it’s ultimately going to turn users off, and ultimately undermine the advertiser’s placements.
Great points. Thanks.