Hangover Navigation
I was talking to one of my colleagues today about the frustrations with design by committee. This is nothing new, but now that I work in government, I’ve found it’s a bit easier to fall into that habit.
As happens with these internal conversations, we obviously end up poking a bit of fun at the process. At one point in the conversation, we were talking about some of the misused buzzwords that always tend to be thrown around in these committee feedback sessions. One of these was ‘hangover navigation’ — which, as it turns out, was actually referring to ‘drop down’ or ‘fly out’ javascript navigation.
I laughed at that, but then it dawned on me that I actually prefer the term ‘hangover navigation’. To me, it better echoes the headaches and frustrations that such navigation can end up giving the site user. So, listen to your committee. 90% of the feedback is usually contradictory or superfluous, but once in a while, a real gem of an idea pokes through.
One Comment
Reminds me of some projects I was involved with a couple years back. My then-company had gone “fly-out happy”, and that would literally be the first suggestion our CEO or one of the developers would make during our very first contact with a customer. I’d just cringe. So naturally that would squelch any chance of looking at the experience end of it and any attempt at innovation. Also, the fly-outs rarely worked on all platforms and more than likely looked bad, yet we sold them every time.
A related incident was offering those same flyouts and offering sub-menu after sub-menu within the fly-outs, so the customer had “everything at their fingertips”. So picture links down the left side, with fly-outs upon fly-outs expanding further and further to the right until they literally touched the right margin. Hangover, indeed.