Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

the flyout flies away

MSNBC.com has dropped its “flyout” menu, where users could access sections and individual stories from the side navigation bar, in favor of something more static (but possibly more usable). An editor’s note explains that the change had a lot to do with user complaints:

We’ve turned off the “flyout” News Menu after hearing from many of you that this tool interfered with your news experience. We believe our new navigation will make it easier to find the wealth of information that we publish each day, as we work to make MSNBC.com your portal to the world.

Over the years, as we have added an enormous array of news, features, data, multimedia, tools and other features, we’ve outgrown the navigation style we pioneered seven years ago.

I used to like the “flyout” menu and the idea of being able to access almost anything in lower levels of the site from the navigation on the home page, but after a while, I came to find it a bit overly cumbersome. Plus, it always seemed to drag down the pageload that much more. (The new MSNBC seems a good bit leaner in comparison.)

In the new navigation bar — still in the same place as before, on the left side of the page — the sublinks associated with the section you’re in get highligted and “promoted” above the main site navigation (screenshot). I have mixed feelings about that, as it divorces the current section from the rest of the site navigation; however, putting the links at the top helps ensure that the links appear “above the fold.”

It also would be nice if, when you’re in a subsection (say, “Consumer Security” in the “Technology and Science” section), there was some sort of indication of that fact — an arrow, a different color, etc. — in the navigation.

All told, though, I think the new and improved nav is a definite step in the right direction. Much cleaner and leaner than before.