Or the priority navigation pattern, or progressively collapsing navigation menu. We can name it in at least three ways.
There are multiple UX solutions for tabs and menus and each of them have their own advantages over another, you just need to pick the best for the case you are trying to solve. At design and development agency Kollegorna we were debating on the most appropriate UX technique for tabs for our client’s website…
A common UI pattern that we see on the web are dropdown menus. They’re used to display related information in pieces, without overwhelming the user with buttons, text, and options. Somewhere that we see these a lot is inside of headers or navigation areas on websites.
Let’s see if we can make one of these menus with CSS alone.
I saw a Dribbble shot the other day by Eli Brumley that had a cool interactive effect. A simple circular blue button, when clicked, expands into a small menu itself. I fired up Professor Mode on CodePen to let people watch as I built, but I also recorded it so I could talk my way through it and publish it here.
I saw an interesting take on off-canvas navigation the other day over on The New Tropic. It wasn't the off-canvas part so much. It was how the elements within the nav took up space. They stretched out to take up all the space, when available, but never squished too far. Those are concepts that flexbox makes pretty easy to express! Let's dig in a little.
The following is a guest post by Micah Miller-Eshleman. Micah designed a variation of the "Priority+ Navigation" concept and uses it in production at the college he works for. I always dig a show & tell behind the thinking and creation of a design pattern, especially when it's working out there in the real world.
The best part about CSS is that it allows web developers to achieve more with less. What exactly does that mean? Well, for a start, CSS allows developers to:
The list goes on and on. The functionality to do great things with less code is there; it's up to the developer to code the XHTML to take full advantage of the power of CSS. One place I often see CSS being under-utilized is with navigation menus.