Mobile user experience inherently constrains what a user can do while providing the opportunity for context intensive navigation. Floating menus or contextual menus are a great way to serve up sub-tasks just in time, giving users choices without disrupting tasks.
In this week’s UX Power Up, Frank covers Floating Menus for improving mobile user experience.
Transcript of video above…
Floating Menus
Hey Frank Spillers here. Welcome to this weeks UX Power Up!
Continuing on our Mobile UX theme.. I wanted to talk to you today about Floating Menus.
Floating menus are one of these interface design techniques that you can use in mobile that can help your users perform an action in context. The idea with that is that people don’t have to leave a screen or a flow – they don’t have to look at another menu or toolbar. It just kind of like facilitates that smooth interaction.
I have a couple examples here, from – the first one is from Food Spotting, which is an app that helps you find restaurants I think. For their floating menu, they have kind of these little circles with the icon with the task that kind of just show up down here.
The other example is from Somely, which has these little – they are almost like petals – almost looks like a little flower. And they let you perform actions like, send to Twitter or Facebook or some social interactions like that. Real nice, real slick in the sense that you are right on the page, you tap and the floating menu just shows up, and aids your task and then kind of goes away.
So, floating menus can be one of those ways to help smoothen the context and the progression that your user is going through, without actually having to make them stop and direct their attention to a menu.
Always a good thing in mobile to keep things smooth and let the user keep going in their direction.
See you next time on a future UX Power Up.
