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As a user I despise hover menus. They are always a point of distraction. "Oh, it's a hover menu. Now let me try to figure out how to hover through this nested n

As a user I despise hover menus. They are always a point of distraction. "Oh, it's a hover menu. Now let me try to figure out how to hover through this nested nightmare." Desktop, web, wherever.

vidanay 6y ago
Hover _anything_ sucks IMO. I have noticed a trend lately where the hover delay seems to be drastically reduced. This means that as I move my mouse around a page, I am constantly bombarded with hover popups that come and go. Quite often, these are right next to a top level thing that I want to click, so I then have to wait for the popup to disappear before I can click on my target.
- eplanit 6y ago
  The web interface to Amazon Prime videos is basically unusable because of the many hover behaviors they've added.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Hover states also make the Netflix website annoying.
    - jagger27 6y ago
      Right! When I’m just scrolling through the list I don’t need an autoplay kicking off just because I happened to rest my mouse there.
      - leephillips 6y ago
        Netflix is one of those sites where I find it hard to imagine that its designers ever tried to use it. It’s maddening.
      - julianlam 6y ago
        Thankfully after much griping, Netflix did add an option to disable this in your profile settings. That it's the default behaviour is still mind boggling.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  I feel like they reduced the delay in an attempt to increase usability. It's tough to slough through all the gatekeepers to get rid of something like the menu styling in a web app. You might get buy in across the team and then a key stakeholder goes on a diatribe of why they think we should keep it and then everyone else runs out of energy trying to counter every one of the rationales. The people fighting for change get tired and pick another battle.
- suzzer99 6y ago
  Utterly egregious example right here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts I'm always accidentally triggering the gigantic hover menu. So annoying.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Another reason hover-anything is bad is because it is totally inaccessible. Observe a 90 year old with poor vision or someone with shaky hands trying to precisely position a mouse cursor over a UI element, while hover-popups are animating all over the place. It's a disaster. Do screen readers even work on hover elements? Need to stop designing the web as if all of your users are healthy 25 year olds.
  - wwalexander 6y ago
    The most frustrating part of using Visual Studio Code for me is the hover/scroll behavior for error/warning messages in the code. You have to hover to view the error, and usually the message is out of the hover pane viewport at the bottom, below the type/value documentation. This would be fine, except for the fact that once you have scrolled to the bottom of the hover pane, further scroll events are applied to the code itself, so the hover pane scrolls out of focus and disappear. I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling one notch at a time hoping for a glimpse of an error message. I only have in-depth VS Code experience writing Go with gopls so maybe this is a very niche issue but it’s so frustrating seeing so much wasted effort go into making and using and solving the weird inconsistencies of hover-based UI elements. The inevitable mess of hacky state management is an invented problem - the cursor should only affect state when buttons are pressed. I miss Plan 9.
Pxtl 6y ago
Especially when the tree is deep and you have to trace a narrow path to your option. It's like the Polus Maze task.
- etxm 6y ago
  God forbid your cursor leaves the third hover menu and it all vanishes before your eyes.
  - Chris_Newton 6y ago
    If you really must have hover-based nested menus in a web app, you can at least use the transition controls so a momentary loss of hover doesn’t immediately hide the whole menu again. Sadly, this technique doesn’t seem to be widely known and a lot of sites aren’t using it, which increases unnecessary frustration for users. :-(
etxm 6y ago
I thought I was the only one. They boil my piss. I’m not sure which is the more annoying aesthetic: - mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access - expecting a click to expand and click, but it hovers, and now you’ve clicked, so you’re going to some random page you didn’t intend to Ok, I can go about my weekend now that this is off my chest. :)
- ectopod 6y ago
  > mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access Like every link in Wikipedia. The preview feature is just awful.
  - lutoma 6y ago
    Personally I really like Wikipedia's preview feature. It makes it easy for me to decide if a link is worth following. The German language version does not have it, and whenever I use that one I quickly start to miss it.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    Opinions may differ. I for my part love the Wikipedia preview hovers! I actually don't even understand what could be perceived bad about them. Are people really moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen without having conscious control of their hand movements? (I understand that this could be true in case of some medical condition like Parkinson's disease but not a general issue at all). Don't want to sound offensive; honest question.
    - Riseed 6y ago
      When navigating, I of course pay close attention to where my cursor is. When I scroll to read through lots of text, I'm not moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen, but I'm also not paying attention to where it is because scrolling up/down behaves the same regardless of where the cursor happens to be. On a site like Wikipedia, this means that my cursor can happen to trigger a preview hover that covers the very text I'm trying to read. Even if it's in a different spot, the movement is enough to be annoyingly distracting and often means I lose my place.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
I don't really like hover menus, but I don't find them to be the worst thing about "modern" "design". That would be topbars that disappear when scrolling down and then reappear if you scroll up, thus preventing you from seeing the content you just scrolled up to look at.
- nathanasmith 6y ago
  >That would be topbars that disappear when scrolling down and then reappear if you scroll up This is close to my biggest pet peeve on the internet. Fortunately, the "kill sticky" bookmarklet[0] gets rid of those as well as other fixed elements on the page. Works on iOS too. [0]https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

As a user I despise hover menus. They are always a point of distraction. "Oh, it's a hover menu. Now let me try to figure out how to hover through this nested nightmare." Desktop, web, wherever.

vidanay 6y ago

Hover _anything_ sucks IMO. I have noticed a trend lately where the hover delay seems to be drastically reduced. This means that as I move my mouse around a page, I am constantly bombarded with hover popups that come and go. Quite often, these are right next to a top level thing that I want to click, so I then have to wait for the popup to disappear before I can click on my target.

eplanit 6y ago
The web interface to Amazon Prime videos is basically unusable because of the many hover behaviors they've added.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Hover states also make the Netflix website annoying.
  - jagger27 6y ago
    Right! When I’m just scrolling through the list I don’t need an autoplay kicking off just because I happened to rest my mouse there.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Netflix is one of those sites where I find it hard to imagine that its designers ever tried to use it. It’s maddening.
    - julianlam 6y ago
      Thankfully after much griping, Netflix did add an option to disable this in your profile settings. That it's the default behaviour is still mind boggling.
datavirtue 6y ago
I feel like they reduced the delay in an attempt to increase usability. It's tough to slough through all the gatekeepers to get rid of something like the menu styling in a web app. You might get buy in across the team and then a key stakeholder goes on a diatribe of why they think we should keep it and then everyone else runs out of energy trying to counter every one of the rationales. The people fighting for change get tired and pick another battle.
suzzer99 6y ago
Utterly egregious example right here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hover?s=ts I'm always accidentally triggering the gigantic hover menu. So annoying.
ryandrake 6y ago
Another reason hover-anything is bad is because it is totally inaccessible. Observe a 90 year old with poor vision or someone with shaky hands trying to precisely position a mouse cursor over a UI element, while hover-popups are animating all over the place. It's a disaster. Do screen readers even work on hover elements? Need to stop designing the web as if all of your users are healthy 25 year olds.
- wwalexander 6y ago
  The most frustrating part of using Visual Studio Code for me is the hover/scroll behavior for error/warning messages in the code. You have to hover to view the error, and usually the message is out of the hover pane viewport at the bottom, below the type/value documentation. This would be fine, except for the fact that once you have scrolled to the bottom of the hover pane, further scroll events are applied to the code itself, so the hover pane scrolls out of focus and disappear. I spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling one notch at a time hoping for a glimpse of an error message. I only have in-depth VS Code experience writing Go with gopls so maybe this is a very niche issue but it’s so frustrating seeing so much wasted effort go into making and using and solving the weird inconsistencies of hover-based UI elements. The inevitable mess of hacky state management is an invented problem - the cursor should only affect state when buttons are pressed. I miss Plan 9.

Pxtl 6y ago

Especially when the tree is deep and you have to trace a narrow path to your option. It's like the Polus Maze task.

etxm 6y ago
God forbid your cursor leaves the third hover menu and it all vanishes before your eyes.
- Chris_Newton 6y ago
  If you really must have hover-based nested menus in a web app, you can at least use the transition controls so a momentary loss of hover doesn’t immediately hide the whole menu again. Sadly, this technique doesn’t seem to be widely known and a lot of sites aren’t using it, which increases unnecessary frustration for users. :-(

etxm 6y ago

I thought I was the only one. They boil my piss. I’m not sure which is the more annoying aesthetic: - mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access - expecting a click to expand and click, but it hovers, and now you’ve clicked, so you’re going to some random page you didn’t intend to Ok, I can go about my weekend now that this is off my chest. :)

ectopod 6y ago
> mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access Like every link in Wikipedia. The preview feature is just awful.
- lutoma 6y ago
  Personally I really like Wikipedia's preview feature. It makes it easy for me to decide if a link is worth following. The German language version does not have it, and whenever I use that one I quickly start to miss it.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  Opinions may differ. I for my part love the Wikipedia preview hovers! I actually don't even understand what could be perceived bad about them. Are people really moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen without having conscious control of their hand movements? (I understand that this could be true in case of some medical condition like Parkinson's disease but not a general issue at all). Don't want to sound offensive; honest question.
  - Riseed 6y ago
    When navigating, I of course pay close attention to where my cursor is. When I scroll to read through lots of text, I'm not moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen, but I'm also not paying attention to where it is because scrolling up/down behaves the same regardless of where the cursor happens to be. On a site like Wikipedia, this means that my cursor can happen to trigger a preview hover that covers the very text I'm trying to read. Even if it's in a different spot, the movement is enough to be annoyingly distracting and often means I lose my place.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

I don't really like hover menus, but I don't find them to be the worst thing about "modern" "design". That would be topbars that disappear when scrolling down and then reappear if you scroll up, thus preventing you from seeing the content you just scrolled up to look at.

nathanasmith 6y ago
>That would be topbars that disappear when scrolling down and then reappear if you scroll up This is close to my biggest pet peeve on the internet. Fortunately, the "kill sticky" bookmarklet[0] gets rid of those as well as other fixed elements on the page. Works on iOS too. [0]https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/