Revealing Amazon's fast-reacting pull-down menu

This article may change your mind if you previously thought Amazon was not doing a lot of work on the user experience.

The upper-left corner of the Amazon home page has a drop-down menu of merchandise sorter browsing. When the mouse slips from the options on the menu, the submenu appears to be fast. We can look at:

This display speed is basically synchronized with the mouse movement, but most of the site's Drop-down menu in the display of submenus will have a certain delay, for example:

This delay response is necessary, because if not, the submenu disappears when you want to move the mouse from one main menu option to a submenu option. Just like this:

But Amazon's Pull-down menu doesn't have this delay, and the submenu doesn't disappear when it shouldn't. How does it do that? The answer is by detecting the direction and trajectory of the mouse movement.

Imagine drawing a triangle between the current position of the mouse and the upper-left corner of the submenu and the lower-left corner. If the mouse moves within the range of the triangle, the user is likely to move the mouse from the main menu one-way submenu, so do not update the submenu immediately. But if you move the mouse over this triangle, you can update the submenu immediately. This is the algorithm behind the Amazon homepage, which is fast-reacting pull-down menus.

God in the details (Lord is in the detail). Revealing a front end detail, we see not only a subtle algorithm, but a technology giant's attitude toward product and user experience. How much of Amazon's tens of billions of market capitalisation has been accumulated from these small, but apparently carefully detailed product details?

If you want to apply this menu logic to your site, this is the jquery plugin written by Khan Academy engineer Ben Kamens.

If you think this is magical, you want to do this job, or feel that there is nothing, your UX design is better than this, consider giving a resume to the Amazon team that developed this detail, because they are recruiting for chaddes@amazon.com.

VIA:bjk5.com