The Frazette Syndrome.

Once, when arguing about form widgets, a colleague of mine, Bob Frazette, blurted out, "I hate drop-downs; they don't show me options, they hide them."

Like most brilliant observations, this is as obvious as it is overlooked. Menus, dropdowns, popups, and carousels, all have the same problem. Without user interaction, they hide all their options. I have long believed that menus would be more effective if they all opened at once. Compare, for instance, the interface into the menu of the Dojo site.

Instead of playing memory games, if you click the full menu button, all your options are there. And keep in mind that the Dojo toolkit people are not only eminently capable of rendering a classic menu, but showcasing a popdown menu is kind of part of their "Business plan"!

This much simpler display is much clearer and easier than a conventional menu. All your options are there for review, regardless of their taxonomy. Better still, you don't have the constant pressure of having to hold down a mouse button while choosing options.

Compare that to the user experience of a classic top-screen or top-window menu. I'm sure the designers of the menu understand why menu item "A" belongs under menu item "B" but I'll be damned if I get it right the first time, or even remember when I found menu item "A" the next day. I can't tell you how menu times I've told someone that menu item "A" is in the menu and they ask "Where"?, forcing me to spend about ten minutes trying to re-find something that is in one of ten different menus -- or worse yet is buried in the SUBMENU of a menu!

Menus are virtually unchanged from the first Macintosh solid bodies where they were introduced. They, and their cousins the drop-down field, are an engineering compromise between screen real estate and the need to display N options.

One of the strengths of the Craig's List interface, for instance, is that it gives all your option sets straight off the home page. While it can be a bit daunting, you really do get the full value of CL right off the home page, and you don't have to negotiate widgets or use the mouse.

There are many cases where there simply is no realistic way to display options in the given space -- lists of states, for instance. However there are many cases where dropdowns are used as insulation against user entries -- the classic one being, a dropdown for the year you were born. I don't know about you but I can type the year I was born with amazing accuracy, and so can most people. It takes almost no javascript to insulate the entry values and would make everyone's life a lot easier.

Also, dropdowns are someitmes used when checkboxes or radio buttons would take almost no additional space. You don't need a drop down for simple "Yes"/"no" choices -- thats the definition of when you need a checkbox. And while three or four option lists take a little more space than a dropdown, honestly: is screen real estate THAT priceless? In trade, all the options are there for casual perusal.

The third avenue away from dropdowns are open (multi-line) select lists. They are in some cases better, but the problem is that they discourage scrolling by creating the illusion that you are seeing all available options. Unless all the options can be shown without the use of a scrollbar you are better off with a dropdown.

And lastly: if you have so many options that you are stuck in a mental war with yourself, consider the use of a wizard. It's much better to simply present a smaller set of options and a page jump than it is to try and simplify a large form has what I've come to call, "Necessary Complexity:" that is, the sheer list of required elements cannot be reduced to a comfortable minimum.

If you cannot reduce the elements in a component to a comfortable minimum, you can always choose to display a subset of them well, then paginate to the next set. I don't know that anyone's determined the average user's threshold for tabs, but you can usually get away with 2-4 tabs for a complex task.

In short: I am not saying there is no places for dropdowns or menus; however, remember that every dropdown gives your users an opportunity to miss options that can be important to them by requiring they take an active poke at your system in order to expose themselves to its values. If you feel comfortable with hiding options, you should probably feel comfortable with getting rid of them entirely.