Your thoughts on dropdowns

Design Lounge Interaction design
1

In Methods to use in small projects - #2 by fnetX, I just suggested to reduce the usage of dropdowns as it is my personal opinion. Just an hour ago, I reviewed a change in a software that would IMHO benefit from less dropdowns. But I wondered what you think about it?

Do you have (or know of) any guidelines for things like dropdown usage that I can refer developers to?

I know of Dropdowns: Design Guidelines - NN/G, but it doesn’t really cover my pain points about avoiding dropdowns in some cases.

My personal opinion on the matter:

  • dropdowns use constant screen space
  • they require one click to open in addition to the selection
  • users cannot see the inside while scanning a form
  • they are good when you have many options and expect few users to need to read/change them, you can conveniently hide the complexity behind an optional selection
  • they are bad when you have few options only, because then the space saving doesn’t pay off
  • they are bad when you expect most people to click through it, because then you double the clicks necessary for everyone
2

Depends on context, but generally agree; I would usually use them only if checkboxes and radio-buttons fail (cause these do not need to be activated to see the options).

3

I find these two articles helpful:

In my opinion Vitaly Friedman is a reliable source as NN/G and worth to follow on LinkedIn. His referred article also contains a decision tree when to use which UI component.

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