Mouse Over actions – A thing of the past?

I talk to people about themes for their website, and they often express interest in some funky image swap or mouse over actions for their website.

I have to tell them that in this day of touch screen technology, what is the point? Touch screens don’t have a mouse and there fore they don’t understand the mouse over action. In fact some mouse over actions are extremely unfriendly to touch screen users. I went to a site the other day on my iPhone, which had fancy mouse over actions on the menu tabs… but of course this was not apparent/intuitive to someone that was not familiar with the site. When you tapped the screen on the tab thinking that you would be navigating to the page, the page reloaded and simply apply the graphic change to the button. It wasn’t apparent what had happened. In fact it was extremely confusing. Needless to say, I didn’t hang around that site.

With the iPad selling by the thousands in the US…

In the United States, the device has proven more popular than some analysts had expected, selling 500,000 units in the week after its April 3 launch.

…and soon to go on sale here in Australia (approx the end of May 2010) and it being sold on the pretense of being the ultimate web browsing device.

People’s sites that are heavy in mouse over actions are going to suffer as users find them unintuitive and hard to navigate. And let’s not forget Windows 7. One of the primary inclusions in the OS is to support touch screen monitors!

So, the touch screen market is growing in leaps and bounds and website developers need to keep pace. Steer away form funky image swap and mouse over actions. Including flash animations that include mouse over detection to activate aspects of their graphical content (let’s not forget that none of the Mac touch screen devices support flash content on websites anyway – something that I am actually glad of).

Keep WordPress themes attractive yet simple! Be user friendly to touchscreen and mobile devices!

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